


All That Glitters

by pearlwisps (orphan_account)



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Homeworld - Freeform, Peridot Loves to Suffer, Post-Steven Bomb 3.0 Canon-Divergent, Slow Burn, War, double canon-divergent as of catch and release holy crap, guaranteed happy ending!!, not really tho she's happy a lot too, redemption fic, takes place after friend ship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-19 04:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4732766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/pearlwisps
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With relationships she never needed nor wanted crystallizing around her, Peridot discovers that emotions are sticky, tangled things that are going to come with a price no matter what she does. And when one day the ocean boils over with the long-forgotten secrets of an ancient war, and a color-coded spectrum of mysteries forcibly unearths itself to face something that threatens a planet she's only just grown to feel a part of, she'll find that the price may be higher than she ever could have imagined.</p><p>  <strong>(Currently on hiatus until I finish <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5131025/chapters/11806442">Copper Star</a>)</strong></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Point of Departure

Peridot is plastered to a pillar, struggling against a straitjacket of viscous, glutinous pink slime.

They've been waiting for this. They'd bated their time and tracked her and let their resentment build up.

And now they've got her.

Trap sludge is a thick, pasty, pale pink substance that the Crystal Gems had used as a weapon during the war; Rose Quartz had concocted it herself, and it's designed to render an enemy stationary if they're blasted with it. Peridot wriggles with a wild amount of enthusiasm against it now, her eyes scorching with a fear-sparked wildfire of hate and indignation. One of her fingertips is just barely able to brush against the material from where they're adhered behind her to the pillar, and she attempts conducting electricity into her imprisonment, blasts discharges at the ground; she's trying everything she can and her aura of panic only escalates with each thing that fails. Every thing fails, of course. Pearl had spent a little under a month figuring out how they could keep Peridot detained in a foolproof manner after they inevitably managed to detain her.

"Let me go," Peridot seethes. "Can't you see that I'm here for the better? That I'm just doing what needs to be done on this disgusting slab of rock you call a planet? You have no  _idea_  what you're getting yourselves into!" Her voice inflates from a radioactive hiss to a hysterical, rasped screech, limbs straining against the quickly-drying, syrupy mound of incarceration that swallows her and the pillar.

Pearl feels agitation stir in her head and in the pit of her stomach, provoked by the instinct to defend her planet against Peridot's words, but she contains it and keeps her demeanor collected.

"Tell us your plans here," she demands.

"You already  _know_ our plan!" Peridot replies "I have my own personal missions here, and everything would have been fine if you would've just left me alone and let me carry them out. But you've left me no choice; I've already contacted Homeworld. We're going to  _crush_ this stupid planet."

Pearl kneels so she's eye-level with their prisoner, within an arm's reach. "You mentioned Yellow Diamond in your transmission to Homeworld," she says. "Tell me what she wants from us. Tell me everything."

Once more, the trap sludge glows sharply with lime-green electricity, and once more, nothing happens. "I'm not telling you  _anything."_

"Alright," Pearl sighs, standing upright, "I suppose you've left me with no choice." An icy, shivery rush echoes through her as she pulls her spear from her gem, backs up and positions it so all she has to do is thrust forward to shatter -

" _Wait!"_

Pearl instantaneously drops her weapon, frozen in horror. No, no,  _no..._

In front of Pearl, Peridot stops writhing, the blistering fear in her eyes dying down a notch as her eyes lock in on something.

Pearl slowly turns around. Steven, of course, stands there before her, chest heaving out of physical exertion.

"Steven!" she exclaims, part in concern and part in ire. "What - what are you - I told you to stay at the temple!"

"Pearl, were you about to...to shatter her?" Steven's eyes are glazed over with watery dread, with a clear hope that Pearl's reply will be a "No."

"What?" Pearl responds with a huffed, anxious laugh. "Why, no, of course not. I was...only meaning to scare her into submission." Steven doesn't need to know the details of what she's done, of what she's willing to do to protect her friends and her planet. It's why she hadn't wanted him to come on this particular mission: Peridot is a threat, and the chance to eliminate her has been handed to her on a silver platter, so to speak. She's simply doing what needs to be done. The valuable information Peridot harbors doesn't matter; once they find Malachite, there will be other gems in their possession who know just as much as Peridot does.

Steven doesn't look reassured.

"Steven." Garnet breaks her silence. She had been the one to subdue Peridot enough in combat so Amethyst could launch the trap sludge at her, but she hasn't moved nor spoken a word since she pummeled Peridot into the floor. In one of her hands is Amethyst, who had been forced to retreat back into her gem after an electron blast had hit her at the last second, before Peridot's abilities had been nullified. "Come with me. Pearl will meet us back at the temple."

Steven shakes his head. "No, this is wrong. Don't hurt Peridot, please _._ She can't be all bad; she doesn't deserve to be shattered, not yet. I know she's done some bad stuff, but...Maybe she's just misunderstood, maybe she -"

"Steven!" Pearl says again, bolder this time. Steven shrinks back slightly, enough to break Pearl's heart, but his naivety just has no place here. "Don't you understand how dangerous she is?"

"Why don't we think this further through, Pearl." Garnet's voice, again. "We could destroy her and go after a more cooperative-seeming gem, Lapis Lazuli perhaps, but we might as well keep Peridot our prisoner, because she's here right now. See if we can get her to talk."

"I'm  _right here,_ you know!" Everyone ignores Peridot for the time of being. Everyone except for Steven, who stares at her with warring emotions dancing across his face.

Pearl looks at Garnet, conflicted. "I...suppose you're not wrong," she says, thinking. "Perhaps I did act a tad too, ah, impulsive. Why didn't you stop me before, if this is what you were thinking?"

The corners of Garnet's lips slide down, and only then does Pearl realize why Garnet's rationalizing words were so belated.

" _They were forced together...They were forced to fuse! This is wrong!"_ Garnet couldn't have projected her grudge towards Peridot with a silent treatment like she had done with Pearl recently. Regardless of if Peridot had created the "fusions" herself or not, she clearly supported them. That was enough to make Garnet dangerous to her in and of itself.

Steven is still looking at Peridot, and now Peridot is returning the stare with an apprehensive expression, patently unnerved.

Garnet sets Amethyst carefully on the floor, summons her gauntlets, springs forward, and punches Peridot square in the chest. Just like that.

Almost instantly the pillar cracks in half, and a fissure blooms its way across the ceiling. They had found Peridot inside a small, shadowy, overgrown temple in Greece; it's human-made and insignificant, so why she had chosen this place as any sort of destination was beyond any of them.

All that remains of Peridot is a faint cloud of green and a triangular gemstone laying nestled in goo at the bottom of the Peridot-shaped cavity. Garnet coolly reaches down into it and takes Peridot into a hand as her gauntlets dematerialize.

"Go, Garnet!" Steven exclaims.

"Let's go home," Garnet says, going back to retrieve Amethyst into her other hand and then claiming the warp pad as her next destination.

"What are you doing _?_ " Pearl says as she and a glowing Steven trail behind her. "Garnet, please! She could regenerate any second now and enact her revenge on us!"

"She won't," and the reply is so solid and so very Garnet that Pearl can't find a way to argue with it.

"I think you guys made the right decision," Steven comments as they walk. "I dunno what it is about her, but I have a good feeling about her, even though she's evil right now. Maybe she can learn to love the earth, just like you guys!"

"Probably not." Garnet offers him a small smile, though neither Pearl nor Steven fail to notice the way the hand carrying Peridot clenches. When Steven gives her a dejected expression in return, she continues with a "However, I do see  _one_ future where perhaps it's possible..."

* * *

Steven is distressed. He's beginning to grow tired of sitting in front of Peridot's cell, doing nothing but watching and waiting. It's Day Four and Peridot's gem hasn't so much as trembled.

Sighing, he stands and walks the saturnine hallway into the main room.

This hallway actually kind of creeps him out. Red light leaks in from the front, complimenting the soft maroon glowing of the walls. The halls are just as eerily silent as they are ringing with hushed secrets; Steven gets the unnerving feeling planted in his gut that these walls have seen things far, far worse than anything he could ever possibly imagine. He's only explored a fraction of the full temple, true (Pearl and the others say he can't go beyond their rooms because there are things hidden deep within the heart of the temple that he's just not ready to see; the only reason he was being allowed into the Burning Room right now was because Steven had begged and begged and begged until finally Garnet had permitted it so long as Pearl and Amethyst were nearby), but the Burning Room is by far the weirdest part of the temple that he's aware of. He hadn't even known that this hallway existed, but it's apparently remained dug out into the wall of the Burning Room for thousands of years, or so Pearl tells him. He finds it sort of pointless, too. It's a moderately-sized hallway and all that it contains is a cell set within the right wall at the very end.

"I don't want him down there," he hears Pearl say, muffled, as the voice is coming from Amethyst's room.

"He'll be fine." Amethyst's voice; dismissive. "You designed that cell yourself way back when, egghead. It's contained things a lot scarier than Peridot. Even if she does regenerate while he's down there, it's not like she'll be able to do anything."

Steven can see Pearl pacing Amethyst's room; the image is distorted, because he's seeing it through the sheet of magical liquid that connects Amethyst's room to the Burning Room.

The two persist to bicker like this ("Yes, but I have hardly any idea what modern gem tech is like, or if the cell's bars will disable it properly..." Pearl continues), and Steven just sort of stands there, debating what to do next. The Burning Room is noiseless, save for the faint, ominous buzz that's always shuddering through the place as an undercurrent, no doubt from the floating menagerie of bubbled gems.

Steven stares up at them, realizing that he couldn't get back up there even if he tried because it's way too high, and Pearl and Amethyst are too wrapped up in their conversation/argument (...convargument) to even look down at him. He shrugs to himself and treks back down the weird hallway. Peridot could regenerate at any moment, after all. The more time he spends at her cell, the more of a chance he has of catching her when she does.

Steven sits down again, drawing his knees to his chest. "I think they're wrong about you," he says to the green gemstone lying across from him. The cell bars look like they're made of normal metal, grate-like in structure with each square about the size of his hand if he splays it out really wide, but Pearl had told him  _very_ carefully not to touch them, so he guesses that means they're not normal metal. "I bet you think you're doing the right thing. Maybe you really do think Earth is a bad, dangerous place. I dunno what they're telling you up in Homeworld." His heart settles into a pool of determination with the next words. "I'm not gonna give up on you, Peridot. I really want to be friends with you once you realize that what you're doing is wrong. Earth is a really cool place, I promise. We've got ice cream, TV, video games, and a bunch of other really awesome stuff. And my favorite part? The fact that there's plenty of love to go around." A thought occurs to him then. "Do you know what love feels like? It seems like all they've taught you in Homeworld is hatred, and - and violence, and..." He trails off, suddenly sad. No wonder she's so angry all the time! Steven would be angry all the time too if he didn't even know what love felt like.

Steven  _will_ at least try to show her what it means to have friends and family, no matter what the Crystal Gems say. It's set in stone.

No one can be wholesomely evil.

A brilliant gush of white light froths through the cell's bars, blinding him temporarily. Steven leaps to his feet, excitement bubbling: maybe Peridot had heard him, and came back to thank him for the chance at redemption.

When the light condenses into something humanoid, partly metallic, and green, the figure is turned away from him. She stands very still.

Steven inches forward.  _Please let her have heard what I said, please let her have heard what I said..._ "Peridot?"

The figure bristles and whips around, and Steven is just barely able to fling himself back and form a rose-tinted bubble around himself in the time that it takes Peridot to position her arm into an electron phaser.

Except several seconds pass, and the blast of energy he's expecting never comes. Well, of  _course_  it doesn't! Pearl and Garnet and Amethyst would have never put Peridot somewhere where she wasn't completely harmless, especially since they're letting him sit down here like this. The bubble dissolves as he pops back to his feet.

And then he sees it.

There is no blast of energy.

Because there are no fingers.

He watches as panic swells in Peridot's facial expression; over and over again, she shakes her arm out and positions it, but it's to no avail. Her arms end in stubs. Peridot's floaty-finger-things are missing.

" _What?"_  Peridot's voice is all broken and hoarse. "No...no no no no  _no no_ _no_ _!_ This can't be happening, this...ugh, why  _me?_ "

Steven just stares at her, unsure of how to react, until his attention is brought to the two gems falling through the ceiling that he catches in his peripheral vision. Pearl and Amethyst are coming down the hall, gems glowing and bodies in battle-ready positions. They rush to him and skid to a stop before Peridot's cell, teeth and weapons bared.

"Peridot," Pearl grits out. She opens her mouth and inhales the breath that's undoubtedly about to be transmuted into a malicious, righteous speech, but she stops when Amethyst's whip disintegrates, its owner doubled over in laughter.

Pearl stares at her in confusion.

"Look at her, P! We've got nothing to worry about! She's useless!"

Peridot's face is totally mutilated in frustration.

"...Oh." Pearl seems to have noticed it too, and manages a slightly hysterical, chirp-like laugh herself. "Yes, that's...inconvenient for her, now isn't it?" She approaches the cell bars, turning up her nose as she looks at her. "We've got you now, Peridot, and you don't even have any means of self-defense," she says with animated triumph. "You might as well talk now."

Peridot meets her gaze with acidic intensity, eyes narrowing behind her visors. She doesn't talk.

Finally, Steven says what needs to be said: "Um, Peridot? Where are your fingers?"

Peridot makes a growling sound of exasperation. "I should have taken longer with my regeneration, okay?" she snaps. "Doesn't mean I can't still tear you defective clods apart!"

"It's cool, we've all been there," Amethyst teases, after another hearty laugh. "Regeneration is tricky business."

Magma levels visibly rise in Peridot, and Steven swears that any moment now she's going to erupt. But without her fingers, she's more of an angry ball of flesh and metal than she is an actual threat. Even so, Steven's been on enough missions to recognize the tenseness in Pearl's body, the way Amethyst's hand twitches towards her gem every now and then. They're still alert. Peridot's almost killed them a couple of times, after all. Having her a couple feet away can't ever be 100% safe, no matter the circumstances. Peridot is dangerous because she isn't good.

Yet.

"Fine," Pearl says, breaking her mutual glare. "If you don't want to talk now, we'll wring information from you later. I'm going to get Garnet." And now she glides off, tugging Steven along with her. Amethyst follows suit, sticking her tongue out at the fuming gem they leave behind.

"You two stay here," Pearl says as she walks underneath the pool. With enviable grace, she launches herself upwards, causing the pane of liquid to undulate as she slips into the other side. She twirls a few times in mid-air and floats to the side, and from there, she's out of sight.

"Don't mess with any of my stuff, or you're in for it!" Amethyst yells after her, but obediently waits until Pearl returns with Garnet, and then the four of them are reunited again. It isn't a particularly happy reunion though, Steven thinks sadly. It's more of a stressful reunion, especially as Pearl starts explaining the situation to Garnet

"That sounds suspicious."

It's not the reaction Pearl had been expecting. Or wanted. "What do you mean?" she asks.

"Regeneration recklessness or not, Peridot's fingers look like they're more than a simple part of her physical manifestation. Based on what we've seen, she depends on them for both self-defense and offense. I find it hard to believe that she is unable to summon them back in the case that something happens to them." Garnet's arms are crossed, the reddish lighting of the Burning Room augmenting her already reddish color pallet. She speaks quietly; Peridot is a good distance from them, but they still don't want to risk her eavesdropping on them.

Pearl chews on her bottom lip. "I hadn't thought of that."

"Amethyst," Garnet says, "go stand guard, just in case."

Steven's eyes twinkle. "Can I go with -"

"No."

At the downhearted face Steven makes, Garnet kneels down, brushing a tuft of curled black hair off his forehead. "I know you want to help her," she says. "But we still aren't sure she's able to be helped. We have to keep you away from her until then. No more sitting in front of her cell."

"But that's not fair!" Steven says. "You let me go on missions and stuff all the time. How is this any more dangerous than a mission?"

"This is different. We've never dealt with something like this."

"Okay, I get it," Steven sighs, not willing to put up much of a fight. The three of them are thousands of years older than him, know a lot more, all that. "But you'll let me know when it's safe to go visit her, right?"

"Yes," Garnet replies, and wraps one arm around him so she can pick him up and bring him to the corner of the room, where she sets him down and presents the palms of her hands to the walls. The door only ever reacts to Garnet's gems, and so it opens, and Garnet ushers Steven back into his room. Amethyst salutes them and proceeds to follow the order given to her, summoning her whip and cracking it once as she makes her way towards Peridot's cell.

Pearl watches her go, mulling everything over. Peridot has been captured. This much is definite. But there is just so much that could go  _wrong._

She feels a hand on her shoulder. "Don't worry too much, Pearl."

"Oh, but Garnet, what if she -"

"And what if she doesn't? It wouldn't be the first time one of Steven's unlikely made-up situations became reality."

Pearl casts an incredulous glance up at her. "You don't actually..."

"I think we should wait and see what happens." The murderous intentions influencing Garnet a few days ago are gone now, Pearl notices. She idly wonders why.

And as she then makes a troubled expression at the ground, she supposes that perhaps she is overreacting, slightly. They have met antagonists far more intimidating than Peridot, after all.

She has absolutely nothing to worry about.

* * *

_I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home I want to go_

Peridot sits in the corner of her cell, back pressed uncomfortably to the indentation where the two walls meet. She needs to find some way to damage her physical form enough to retreat back into her gem, where she can rebuild her fingers. She knew she should have taken a longer time with her regeneration, too; she  _knew_ she wasn't quite ready to go back, but she was so desperate to see what had become of her that she just -  _ugh._

Homeworld is coming to get her. It'll be all right.

She draws her knees to her chest.

And everything had been going so  _well,_ too; everything would have continued to go well if it weren't for the meddling of that fusion, the Earth-made abomination, and the pathetic, rebellious pearl. And the steven. She would have to conduct more research on the steven.

The more she thinks about it, about them, the Crystal Gems, the more she wants to curl further in on herself. A terrifying feeling guzzles her down. Her failure feels sticky and dark as it cultivates in her chest, a mass of suffocating self-depreciating that feeds on her negative thought.

Maybe if she escapes on her own and kills the Crystal Gems herself, Yellow Diamond will forgive her. But to do that, she needs her fingers back. Perhaps she can provoke one of the Gems into attacking her. Or, the pudgy-looking creature, the steven, doesn't seem to be incredibly smart. She's sure it can easily be tricked by her superior mindset.

_She's useless,_ the amethyst had said.  _Useless._

Useless. _Useless_. The worst possible offense. The sludgey feeling in her chest caresses the inside of her throat as it expands, lapping up the word now pulsing icily through her. If she can't get herself out of this mess and find a way to restore her worth to the Yellow Domain, restore her reputation, she deserves the punishment coming for her.     

 


	2. A New Sanction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ik i kind of put this in the tags but to explain it better: with the steven universe hiatus ending this thursday (god bless amen) i feel like it's worth mentioning that this fic is going to be totally post-steven bomb 3.0 canon-divergent. this means that i've got 42 chapters (though that's something that's subject to change) plotted out for this fic and no matter what happens in the show, the headcanons, plot twists, character backstories, etc. that i have planned right now aren't going to change.

"So..." Steven says casually, leaned up against the kitchen counter with one leg crossed over the other. "It's been about a week since Peridot regenerated. Seven days of her not getting out or hurting us or doing anything. Now, I'm not trying to make any connections here, but..."

Pearl knows that they need to have a talk.

"...Steven," she says carefully. "Are you sure about this?"

"About what? The Peridot thing?"

"Yes, the...Peridot thing."

"I think so," Steven says. "Garnet told me the other day that maybe I should think this whole thing through a little better, so I have been." He pulls himself onto one of the wooden chairs, his face pinching into a pensive expression as he swings his legs back and forth. "I know Peridot's bad right now. I really do; I'm not trying to say that she's good. But I'm saying that maybe she  _can_  be good. That maybe if I show her enough of Earth, and at least try to show her some happy emotions, she'll start to realize how wrong she is." He rubs the back of his neck, meeting Pearl's gaze. "I don't know if it'll work. But I have to try."

Pearl's eyes flutter shut as her memory is triggered and latches onto a section of Steven's dialogue like a leech onto the side of a rotted, defective creature that bleeds infinitely. Bleeds infinitely to safeguard someone who's already gone. She opens her eyes again.

"I feel like - like I'm meant to do it, you know? I guess it sounds kind of crazy, but you know how Mom was trying to fix corrupted gems? Maybe I'm supposed to do that too. And maybe I can do it right this time."

Pearl holds the tension in her chest as the pink-dyed knots form. They'll leave soon. She has an expertise in unraveling them.

" _I don't know if it'll work. But I have to try."_ These had been Rose's exact words, thousands of years ago. She'd almost gotten herself killed for them. She'd snuck away into the night before Pearl could stop her and surrendered herself to one of the Homeworld encampments, in hopes that maybe once she was inside she could talk to the enemies, convert them, entice them with the beauty of this planet. It had taken so much effort and four lives to get her out of there. Pearl had only narrowly escaped death herself, so rampaging was she to rescue Rose Quartz that her fighting form was completely out of balance and she could concentrate on nothing but killing and finding Rose alive, not keeping her stance wide and her body lowered.

"But, Steven, Peridot isn't corrupted," Pearl says, pulling herself out of the memory. Isn't it spectacular, the way she's now able to veil thoughts of Rose from herself right before they're able to drill further into her heart? And, oh, the lovely pink cavity in her heart. She couldn't ever live without it, but she isn't sure how much more damage it can take.

"I know," Steven replies. "But her morals are kind of corrupted, don't you think?"

"And this is why you want to help her," Pearl verifies. She can't let herself get twined within her thoughts, not in front of Steven. Perhaps later, in the dead of the night, when she has nothing but the sound of running water to comfort her, the gleam of the swords that fill her company when she gets lonely sometimes. The holographic show of memory that she projects when she can't keep her mind strong enough to keep war memories out and gives in to the guilty pleasure. "You want to cleanse her character."

"Yeah," Steven answers. "I guess I...kind of feel obligated to. I  _want_ to. And plus, I mean, I'm always open to making new friends. And Peridot seems really cool!"

"Steven," Pearl says, arranging vocabulary in her mind so her words will come out the way she wants them to. "Your mother had this same quest once, did you know that? And, oh, did she try to achieve her goal. She tried so hard." The words flow naturally here, the angst she's sick and tired of but ever co-dependent on being brushed aside. This is a transition that she's perfected. "But she never did get there. Do you honestly believe that you can perfect her abilities better than her thousands of years of experience? At twelve years old?" She doesn't mean it an offensive way, merely a factual one, but Steven looks wounded nonetheless.

"I almost did once, though," Steven insists. "I got farther than Mom. I had Centipeetle."

He does prove a valid point. Pearl concentrates her gaze on the wall. Part of her wants to let him do as he pleases and give Peridot's character purification a shot; wants to see if perhaps he really can be more successful than his mother ever had been. Part of her wants coddle him and shelter him from every single bad thing.  _He's not ready,_ it persists manically.  _He's not ready for this sort of thing, not yet._

One of them is more realistic than the other and she knows it.

"Tell you what," she says. "I'll go get Garnet and Amethyst and bring them up here, and we'll all have a meeting. A democratic vote, of sorts."

Steven's eyes go alight. "That would be great, Pearl, thanks!"

Pearl pats his head and leaves the kitchen, willing the door to the temple to open.

_He's not her._

_We know that very well. We never said he was._

_It's not her gem, either. Not anymore. Steven has surprised us before. He's growing up quicker than we want him to. Already wanting to continue his mother's legacy._

Pearl shakes her head and walks into a room of fountains with pastel waters.

* * *

"Court adjorned," Amethyst says, her arm morphing into a gavel that she smashes into the floor, eliciting a laugh from Steven and a cold glare from Pearl. Pearl, who is currently trying to tame the anxiety that squirms in her insides, a theatre of every possible thing that could go wrong playing relentlessly in her mind. She wonders if this is what it feels like to be Garnet. How unbelievably _stressful._

Pearl had told herself beforehand that she would be all right with whatever they decided upon, that she would be more than happy to bestow Steven with that sort of trust and even happier to keep him away from the Burning Room entirely. She tries to remind herself of this now.

Amethyst had been all for letting Steven try to help Peridot out, going on about how the danger levels were low and the benefit potential was high, and all the while it would be a chance to show Steven that they accepted that he was growing up, that they trusted him.

Garnet had clearly been thoughtful about letting him go to the Burning Room on his own, as she logically would be. But she, too, seemed to want to let this be an opportunity for Steven to prove himself like he's constantly wanting to. Peridot is harmless in her current state, after all, and Steven has his consistent methods of self-defense that make them all feel better.

Pearl had flashed a flag of neutrality but didn't put forth any effort into hiding her discomfort with the idea.

Ultimately, the verdict was a yes, so long as the Gems could linger near the first few times and every now and then after that to eavesdrop. Naturally, Steven is ecstatic with the permission and immediately makes a schedule of visiting Peridot daily.

"Can I go talk to her right now?" he asks. Pearl and Amethyst turn to Garnet.

"I don't see why not," Garnet says after a pause. "Pearl and Amethyst can stay here. I'll be in the main room next to that hallway if anything happens. Peridot won't even know I'm there."

"You know, I wouldn't particularly mind going down there with you, if you needed the help," Pearl says, voice rushed in the way it is when she implicitly pleads for things.

"I've got it, Pearl," Garnet replies. She leads Steven to the temple door and makes it open for her, allowing him to walk in front of her as they enter the room.

"Go on, then," Garnet says as the door seals shut behind them. She stands there, still as a statue. "I'll be here."

Steven nods.

This is the first solo gem-stuff mission he's ever had.

_Serious Steven, activate._

He journeys across the room, looking up at the bubbled gems as he does.  _One day,_ he promises them,  _I'll do what my mom wasn't able to. I'll set you guys free and I'll fix you and we can be friends._  He steps through a wall of red mist, which presents him with the eerie, atmospheric hallway.  _Serious Steven,_ he reminds himself as his heartbeat starts to inexplicably twist. More walking.

"H-Hey, Peridot!" he says when he reaches his destination, flashing her a pair of finger pistols. Peridot had already been standing when he had reached her, examining the wall, but she jolts even more upright now, startled.

"You," she says as she de-bristles, eyes narrowing unkindly. Her tone of voice isn't kind at all either. Inklings of second thought poke holes in Steven's grand plan.

"Yep," Steven says, stretching out his arms, "me." They stare at each other. "So, uh...How's your weekend been?"

"My...weekend?" Peridot's looking at him like he's a fossil in a paleontology museum and Steven kind of squirms underneath her gaze. "Is that ancient Earth terminology for something I should be aware of?"

"Nevermind," Steven coughs, "um." He racks his brain for conversation topics that are friendly with mean aliens. He looks Peridot's body up and down, hoping that it will inspire ideas. "Oh, hey! How'd you get your foot back?"

"That's none of your concern," Peridot replies sourly, and the conversation lulls again. This is gonna be a lot harder than he had thought it was going to be.

Steven slowly fills his lungs with oxygen and coaches himself to stay destressed. He can do this. He wants to say that he can continue his mom's legacy.

They'll get there.

* * *

_Two weeks, three days, and a half an hour later_

"I brought something for you," Steven says, setting a plastic bag on the floor.

Peridot unfurls in her corner. She's been there every time Steven has come to visit her as of late. He doesn't really know what to make of it; he knows that Peridot is bad right now, and that if she got the chance she'd probably start trying to hurt them again. He knows that the Crystal Gems think it's near impossible that she has any shot at redemption. But the other part of him just sees a sad gem in the corner of a room, and it wants to help her. It wants to make sure she knows what love and friendship feel like before it gives up on her.

"You again," Peridot grumbles, lifting her head.

Steven smiles at her. He extracts a box from the bag, opens it, bends the contents in half a few times so the silence is broken weakly with a faint crackling sound, and pushes the now-aglow assortment of glowsticks through the bars at the prisoner.

Peridot doesn't move. "What are those."

"They're glowsticks," Steven says, smiling wider at Peridot's unintended use of a meme. "I don't really know what Homeworld looks like, but every time I imagine it I imagine a bunch of glowy, super-cool technology and stuff. So I thought maybe they'd remind you of home, 'cause I know you've been feeling homesick."

Peridot just looks at him, looking bored, and tired. "Not only is your vision of Homeworld horrifically off, but what, exactly, am I supposed to do with these?"

What  _does_  Homeworld look like, then? Steven makes a mental note to ask her about it some other time. Pearl and Garnet don't like to talk about Homeworld so Steven has never been able to get any information on it. "I mean, I know you can't really hold them or anything like that, but I just figured you'd like some scenery in here."

Peridot glares at the radiant sticks. "Why are you doing this?" she asks, like the situation is physically paining her. "Your  _family,_ as I believe you've referred to them as in the past, wants to kill me. Why haven't you inherited their attitude? Why are you acting like I'm not a death threat?"

"Well," Steven giggles, "you're not a _serious_ death threat. Especially not right now. You may be dangerous, definitely, but you're kind of like a one-gem Team Rocket."

Peridot blinks at him, only wasting a second to attempt to make sense of his reference before an agitated expression paints its way across her face. "Your leaders don't like me. You're telling me that you haven't even slightly conformed to their opinion?"

"They've never ordered me to conform to any opinion," Steven says, looking genuinely confused. "And they're not my leaders. We're a team. We're the Crystal Gems, together."

Peridot stares at him, hard, for a long few seconds. "I'm unable to process that," she says. "They're superior to you, are they not? They're pure gems and you're only half of one."

Steven's face lightens. "Hey, you remembered that! I thought you weren't listening that one time I was explaining to you what I was, because you kept muttering stuff to yourself and weren't even really paying attention to what I was saying."

Peridot rolls her eyes. "Of course I remembered, that's integral information for -  _ngh,_ that's not the point here."

"What is, then?"

Peridor makes a jaundiced expression and glances away. "Just...leave," she says. "Your being here is pointless. I don't want your presence, and I definitely don't want your pity."

"Woah, hold the phone," Steven says. "First of all, it's not pity, it's kindness. And you do deserve it, if that's what you're trying to say. Everyone does, and I don't think you've been shown much."

Peridot looks thoroughly repulsed. But she doesn't reply.

* * *

_One week, one day, and fifteen minutes later_

She won't admit it, but Peridot begins to get kind of used to Steven coming to visit her daily. Not in the way that she actually looks forward to it. She merely expects it now. Every day, the slapping of sandals on stony floor brings Steven before her cell, and he'll sit there while she sits on the other side of the cell bars, and they'll have a one-sided conversation: Steven banters about the type of day he's been having, the goings-on of the Crystal Gems, an adventure that he had with Connie. Through it all, Peridot involuntarily absorbs tidbits of random, useless knowledge. It's because of this that she can now list several types of foods (a disgusting concept, by the way) that sprout from the ground but she's still clueless about the salient stuff, like why Rose Quartz gave up her physical form for this - this runted  _hybrid_ , why there are still gems inhabiting Earth when her superiors had promised her that there weren't any, or, most importantly, slip-ups of information that could help her strategize a plan out of here.

Steven will talk and talk and talk and Peridot will listen with a dull expression on her face, injecting a snide remark into the conversation every now and then. It isn't preferred interaction, but it's better than nothing. Not that she needs interaction in the first place, but she digresses.

She doesn't know how much time has passed since her first day of imprisonment on the day that the footsteps sound from down the hall. Steven's footfalls are heavy and spaced enough for it to be assumed that he's walking with casual pacing; these are so light Peridot can hardly detect them at all, and they falter in rhythm every few seconds, like their creator is hesitant of their destination.

Peridot forces herself to her feet with despirited anxiety. That isn't Steven. She doesn't know why none of the Crystal Gems have come to see her since they abruptly stopped guarding her, but she was honestly starting to hope they would just leave her alone completely.

The pale figure that stands before her begs to differ. The air is thick with tension. Really. Peridot half-expects sparks to start flying.

"I would have killed you, had it not been for Steven," Pearl says. Such a lovely conversationalist, clearly. "You realize that, right?"

Peridot's gem fizzes hotly, instinct begging her to find a way to escape this conversation. She decides to put up an act and shrugs, casting her gaze aside. "I probably would have found a way out of it, even if it weren't for him. You Crystal Gems aren't exactly what I would call... _advanced._ "

Pearl opens her mouth to counter, then seems to reconsider. "My point here is that Steven is one of the purest entities you will ever encounter, and if you -" She starts to falter in her show of cool condescending here, one fist clenching at her side while her brows furrow and her gaze intensifies. "If you so far as look at him in a hostile manner, I will end you, understood?"

If Peridot's throat dries and a swell of fear slides down her spine, that's no one's business except her own. In this moment Peridot has no doubt that this is  _the_ pearl. The pearl Homeworld has forbidden from databases but there's a black market of information within the peridot community, and Peridot had gone through a rebellious streak for some five years of her first one thousand years (it ended when one of them got caught and sent to the sphalerites, and guilt-glazed fear of being discovered by Yellow Diamond caught up; her raw, electric loyalty always comes before individuality and the thirst to pursue new knowledge that's common to all peridots, always). She wasn't so intimidated by the pearl before, in open spaces where she could escape easily and the Crystal Gems were amusingly baffled by her technology; here, though, with Peridot defenseless and cornered, staring straight into the deadly vehemence in the pearl's eyes? She's reminded of the urgency of her situation.

She just wants to go home.

"He may very well be the only creature willing to show you genuine kindness. Surely, you've figured out why he's been visiting you every day? You're more twisted than we thought if you realize this and still have violent intensions towards him." The pearl's fist unclenches and she flexes her fingers. "That's all. We'll speak more once we decide what we want to do with you."

"And if I no longer want to hurt him?" So quiet she doesn't know if she's actually spoken the words aloud or not. She's mildly perplexed by the pearl's words; she actually hasn't the slightest idea why Steven's been visiting her every day. But she does know that Steven is nowhere near threatening, and her superiors had told her to only harm things that got in her way.

"What?" The force of the pearl's stare softens; she looks more caught off guard than anything else.

Peridot's glaring at the wall to the left of her. She feels inexplicably ashamed. "I've determined that the half-gemling does not pose a threat to our mission. He expresses no violent wishes towards us. His elimination is not required."

The pearl covers the bottom half of her face with a hand. It falls a few moments later.

"Steven will be down to visit you shortly." She dusts herself off and clears her throat, regaining composure. Peridot watches her leave with a bitter expression that's sweetened only so _, so_ slightly when Steven pushes her aside with a lopsided "Hey, Pearl!" as he bounds to Peridot's cell.

He sits down, panting. "You will not  _believe_ what just happened at the Big Donut."

Peridot sits down too, setting her conversation with the pearl aside in her mental space for later dissection. "Spit it out, then."

"Okay, so, at first glance it looked like they were just regular donuts, right? But then Sadie started screaming and me and Lars look at her and we realize that there are  _spiders_ everywhere..."

Peridot thinks back to the pearl's words and realizes that she truly never has seen a creature bubbled over with such a sickening amount of innocence. It almost makes her feel like she's the bad guy.


	3. Peridot's Tumultuous Love Affair with Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohhh ym god so.....last night's episode huh. boy howdy were my headcanons for peridot's metal limbs dispelled. that being said, i'd like to clarify that she's more of a cyborg-ish-type-thing in this fic. canon-divergent is the name of the game.
> 
> (on the other hand though.....smol peridot................oh my god..babey.....)

So what if she's starting to become accustomed to his useless prattle because he's the only thing feeding her empathy in her failure-ridden, powerless state. So  _what._

Kindness is foreign to her, and otherworldly, and she tries to dissect it in her mind every now and then and it makes her flesh crawl every time she does. What a pleasantly unpleasant, sticky, gooey thing kindness is, based on her observations so far.

Her own kind have never treated her this way, for one thing. It's difficult for Peridot to feel compassion towards her fellow peridots when old memories still ring vividly in her mind, thousands of years later: memories of competing with the others so she wouldn't be labeled Not Good Enough and pulverized, pushing and shoving other peridots to the side in various ways of various meaning to lurch her way to the top-ranked peridots: the only peridots that aren't shattered a mere one hundred years after creation. The mass execution of peridots is an annual thing. And it's a terrible thing at that if you happen to be a peridot who hasn't exceeded what's expected of you.

The first time she had ever awoken, she was only one thought:  _be better. Do better. Please your superiors._

And it's not uncommon for jaspers and peridots to work together on missions, seeing that it's a nearly infallible brains-and-muscle package. But her relationship with Jasper has only ever been business. No benevolence there. Jasper. Where is Jasper? Peridot could use her right about now.

There are other gems that work near her sector: beryls, zoisites, agates. But peridots by nature are isolationists, so they can focus solely on the task at hand rather than get tangled up in the web of the emotions required for leisurely relationships. She finds herself thinking about the pearl, the last remaining pearl, and her fierce custodial nature as well as her fierce love for more things than Peridot probably even has capacity for. A weakness. A design flaw.

And then there is Yellow Diamond. Yellow Diamond does not show you kindness, but when she speaks to you directly, that alone is enough to make you shimmer and smolder for the next quarter of a century. Receiving her praise is like injecting a white star's worth of energy into the sole fabric of your gem and then feeling the liquid plasma root deep into your physical form. Peridot supposes that's the closest kin she's experienced to the sort of kindness Steven gives her.

Except Steven's kindness does not grant you the light of a star. It is subtle and grossly warm and crawls under your skin.

Weeks have passed. He poses no threat to her, and by laws of balancing energy, Peridot decides to pose no threat towards him.

Oh, but the Crystal Gems are a whole other story. She detests them. She detests them with every fiber in her being. No matter how sweet and gentle Steven attempts to make them out to be, she detests them for messing with her mission, and she detests them for destroying her things, and she detests them for keeping her imprisoned like this, and she  _especially_ detests them for the possibility that after she finds her way home (and she  _will_ find her way home), Yellow Diamond will never regard her in the same way again. Peridot has spent thousands of years proving her loyalty, letting everyone know that even if she is an early design she is not substandard; is that really destined to crumble because of a few pathetic, renegade gems?

 _Technically speaking,_ Peridot reminds herself,  _the half-gemling creature is a Crystal Gem as well._ And so it's the oddest thing that she can't make herself hate Steven. She has tried. It is impossible.

Steven, who does in fact stand before her now.

He looks troubled. He wrings his hands out, eyes anxiously flicking to the side, mouth opening and then closing again.

"Peridot?" he says, voice heavy. "I, uhh...I have something to tell you." Sweat laminates his face.

Peridot draws all her systems into an alert state; whatever Steven has to say here is clearly important if it's causing him so much distress. Important enough, perhaps, that if Peridot picks it apart enough she'll be able to extract anything, anything at  _all,_ that will aid her in figuring out how to disable the cell and get out of here.

"And that is?" she asks.

"The - The Gems, they..." Steven's face flushes red, his lower lip wobbles, he shakes his head, and then he runs away screaming.

Peridot grits her teeth. So much for that.

As Steven bolts off, he trips halfway down the hallway, just barely able to catch himself on the palms of his hands before his face meets unceremoniously with the floor. He looks momentarily dazed, glancing about him confusedly, and then he picks himself up and bounds off again.

And as he fell, something miraculous had happened. Something divinely, wondrously miraculous.

Steven doesn't glance behind him as he runs, which is a good thing, because if he had he would have been aware of the fact that Peridot's cell opens. The bars (some sort of metallic substance at first glance but they burn viciously to the touch, Peridot had been unpleasantly surprised to find out some time ago) dematerialize in front of her, leaving a gaping, square-shaped exit before her.

Peridot blinks at the clear view she now has of the wall across from her. Hesitantly, she inches her foot across the line where the bars had sprung up from before, wincing in apprehension: she has to be careful. This could very well be a trap set up by the Crystal Gems in which they have only made it  _look_ like the cell bars are gone and so Peridot will be prompted to walk out into the open, where lasers will discharge down from the ceiling and she will be shattered. No lasers descend (to her utmost delight), and she sticks her whole leg out across the boundary. Still nothing. She sets her foot down and slides out into the hall. Nothing.

Sparking, fiery triumph erupts in her.

Wasting no time, Peridot promptly strides towards the front of the vestibule. Her chest puffs and a delinquent smirk brightens her face, an expression that mildly fades to curiosity when she passes where Steven had fallen.  _I wonder what -_ no, no way, she doesn't have time.

She tries to keep walking, but finds herself restrained by the part of her mind that whines,  _But, we never get to self-indulge in studying the things we want to on Homeworld..._

Peridot bites her lip. Thirty seconds won't make much of a difference, she's sure.

She kneels down, eyes searching the floor. She sees nothing at first. Then, faint ripples of translucent distortion that flash only every few seconds, in a thin line that stretches from one wall to the other. Peridot prods the line with one stumpy arm. There is certainly something material there. It hits her then; it has been so long since she has seen one of these things that the thought was dusty in her mind. But this - this is an infusion cord, is it not? One specialized for a destabilizer cell, she derives. Of course, these things are far more developed now, and this is a rather ancient model, but Peridot is still faintly impressed. She hadn't been aware that these were able to function on Earth at all.

Peridot feels along the wall, doing the best she can without any actual fingers, and her arm brushes against something, and a mechanical hum pervades the air and then slips out of it just as quickly. The infusion port blooms into visibility, a bulbous structure that latches onto the wall and swirls with multi-hued pastels as if it's alive. Pleased with herself for her detective work, Peridot glances to her side and sees the cord there too, visible now with the same color pallet, stretched out across the hall. It snakes along the bottom of the wall opposite her and ends tucked into a small hole next to Peridot's ex-cell.

Simply to confirm her theory, Peridot traps the cord in between the flat plating at the ends of her arms and uses this method to lift it up and touch the end of the cord to the infusion port. The end of the cord splits into five slivers, and the individual sections of parting seal themselves to the port, the glittering surfaces of the two structures amplifying in their luster. Peridot stands upright and looks at the cell and, as expected, tiny, luminous particles flow from the vicinity of where the cord is plugged into the wall and into the quadrate depression in the wall, arranging and rearranging themselves into prison cell bars. Peridot would be lying if she said she isn't at least slightly fascinated. She's staring at what she's fairly sure is an early, primitive form of the gem destabilizer cells she's seen (and worked herself every once in a while, ironically) on space crafts and back at home. Even so, she's curious as to how to veil the cord from sight like how it had been earlier, and what the point of having an infusion port so far away from the cell was, especially across the hall like this, where something like Steven's mistake could happen.

Speaking of Steven's mistake. Peridot takes the cord into her arms and pulls at it with as much force as she can muster; it doesn't budge, it doesn't so much as stretch away from the infusion port. So then how could Steven possibly have...Even if he had fallen exceptionally hard, it seems unlikely that the cord would have become unplugged.

Peridot stares at it, then looks out into the entranceway of the hall. If she wants to stage an escape, it should probably be soon. She says goodbye to the technological mystery, still irritatingly vexed, and tears herself away from the wall. And only then does she realize that she has absolutely no escape plan. Nor does she have any idea where she is. And doing this all while fingerless is a definite risk. But there's no time; she has no way of slipping back into her cell and making it seem like she had never left after her meddling episode, and if one of the Crystal Gems come to check on her and find her wandering around like this, she's done for.

She looks back into the entranceway. She's just going to have to figure it out as she goes. "Wing it," she believes she had heard Steven say once.

Peridot walks until the ominous glowing walls come to a stop. The entrance here is so bathed in red light, wisps of scarlet mist slithering around her, that is is impossible to see the room this vestibule leads to. This hallway unnerves her, she'll admit. It feels alive. Like the walls surrounding her breathe and exhale devilry.

Peridot braces herself and steps out of the mist, and a solution of fear and horror concocts itself inside her.

Gemstones. So many of them. Floating casually about a grandiose, arched room with dull flammeous lighting and bulging, vein-like structures twisting over the walls. In the center is a raised well of some material Peridot can't discern, but it looks similar to magma, except thinner. A sort of symbol encircles the well, this same substance filling the impressions that illustrate it. The gems aren't shattered and they aren't cracked, they're just - there. Imprisoned in small pink orbs.

How many gems have suffered Peridot's fate before her? How many victims have these Crystal Gems claimed?

She tries to soothe the threshing fright inside her. She isn't going to be getting anywhere by standing here and staring.

Peridot scans the walls, every inch of the room, searching for an opening. She is unable to run up walls that aren't perfectly vertical, and these walls are not perfectly vertical. There's also a hole close to the ceiling, a sheet of liquid stretched across it. It definitely looks like it leads to somewhere else, but it is too high for her to get to.

She stares at the opening desperately, as if doing so will bring the hole closer to her. If only she could just - she feels the urgency crawl inside of her, a necessity to get herself up there that swallows her.

The temperature of the room dips suddenly. Peridot shivers and flexes her fingers against the cold.

Her eyes widen. Wait.

Peridot flexes her fingers again.

She laughs maniacally, ecstatically, sparkling triumph diluted in her voice; she has absolutely no idea how she got them to come back but she is  _exceptionally_ proud of herself for it. "Take  _that,_  you Crystal Clods," she mutters to herself, grinning. She glides her fingers over her arms, down her hips, just to test out the refined sense of touch that she is so pleased to have back. Her metal prosthetics have sensory adaptations as well, but they're dull in comparison.

She tries to remember how she had done that - that thing, the thing where her fingers give her enough lift to propel her into the air. She brings her fingers closer to her face so she can examine them; she can make them spin, but seems to have forgotten how to get them to do that at the pace she needs them to. And then suddenly something clicks, and Peridot can't really say if it's voluntary or not when her fingers begin to revolve so quickly she can't discern the individual digits and at a force that makes it so they actually hurt pretty bad when she accidentally slashes herself in the face with them.

" _Ow,"_ she whines, but the self-inflicted pain is forgotten when she holds her arm out away from her face and her feet leave the ground. She curls herself into a ball-esque figure, knees tucked into her chest behind an arm that she wraps around herself. She can almost  _see_ the expressions that the Crystal Gems will have when they find that she's gone. She grins at the thought.

Peridot aims herself for the ceiling pool, uneasy the last few seconds before she ascends into it, but the pane of liquid brings her no pain as she slips through. She leans to the side to bring herself above solid ground and attempts a clean landing, but ends up unceremoniously dumping herself on the floor instead. Rubbing her head and mumbling her frustrations, Peridot sits up, examining the new installment of surroundings.

The new room is shaded in indigo shadows, gigantic crystals sprouting from the walls in unpredictable, unruly angles. Peridot stands up and starts walking and effectively becomes lost very quickly.

There's just so much stuff; stuff strewn on the floor, stuff towering over her in dysphoric piles, stuff falling from aforementioned piles when the inbalance acts out. Peridot picks up an object that appears to be a rubbery, hollow human hand. What is this even supposed to  _do_? She tosses the article aside and continues her journey.

There's a wash of light from somewhere in the distance. The sound of things cluttering about and a voice.

Peridot tenses, paralyzed in something synonymous to fear, and stands there listening as apprehension begins to gnaw at her. The voice nears her. She recognizes it as the amethyst's.

"Stupid Pearl," she's saying, and something clatters onto the floor. "It's not  _my_ fault that the Swirl Cross went missing. She was the last one who had it, but hey, look, something's missing, so let's all blame Amethyst!"

Peridot slides behind a pile of garbage as quietly as she can, but unfortunately metal feet on stone flooring isn't a silent conjunction. And, purely because Peridot enjoys making things more difficult for herself, of course, she brushes against something in her attempt to remain flush to the pile and it audibly clangs to the floor.

Peridot winces and the amethyst's footsteps stop. Peridot doesn't dare move. She could dart out and attack the amethyst if she really wanted to, but she won't unless the situation becomes that urgent. She isn't entirely confident in her newly-discovered combat abilities, and a battle scene would no doubt attract the other Crystal Gems to her.

"Huh," the amethyst says, and knots of tension unravel in Peridot's chest as she starts walking again. "Must be that one thing I put over there on that one day."

Peridot adjusts herself around the pile as the amethyst meanders along so she's consistently hidden from sight, and then does the same thing when the amethyst comes back the same way, and Peridot catches only a small glimpse of something sparkling in her hand.

"Why, would you imagine that!" the amethyst is saying, tone sardonic. "Right at the foot of one of Pearl's waterfalls! I wonder how on earth it got there? But watch, she's  _still_ gonna yell at me, just because it was in  _my_ room." A surge of remote light, and then silence.

Once she's positive that she's alone again, Peridot slips out into the open and heads towards where the light had been. That must be the exit.

She then finds herself facing the same problem she had before: she had been positive that the amethyst had disappeared through here, and yet there is no door, no anything, no way for Peridot to follow her. It occurs to her that perhaps following the amethyst isn't the best idea anyway. The Crystal Gems are the very gems she is trying to  _avoid._

Defeated, Peridot heads back into the thick of the chaotic mess. She is beginning to get frustrated.

A limpid stream originates from a pool she comes across. Raw liquid reserves are rarer on Homeworld than they are here on Earth, but even so, in all of Peridot's experience, rivers such as this one tend to lead to somewhere. And so she uses the stream as a map; she treks past torn clumps of fabric, past broken, robotic creatures that stare at her with vacant eyes as she passes them. Past fluorescently colored round things, past old, rotting books (it's been a very long time since she's ever seen a book, Peridot finds herself thinking), past so many things that she's never seen before.

She reaches the end of the river, where it feeds into a body of water that must be the foot of the waterfall the amethyst had been griping about earlier. Peridot looks upward. The waterfall becomes more of a thick tubule of water as it ascends, winding through mid-air in curves and loops that shouldn't be possible. Peridot's vision isn't advanced enough to conclude where it leads to, ribboning far off into the distance over a wasteland of lavender crystals and blue-violet light.

"Now, isn't this going to be fun," she says to herself. She sees no other option here. It's the closest lead she has.

Peridot gyrates her fingers and prays that she'll have enough stamina to get herself all the way over there. If worst comes to worst, she can rest among the towering crystals, far out into this crystalline wilderness where she's sure no one would think to look for her.

She only has one hesitation, and it is this: Peridot's experience with dihydrogen monoxide is limited, but she knows that it is very, very bad for her. She had been told by her superiors, before she had left for this planet that is seventy-one-percent water, that electricity and H2O don't mix well. And electricity is slightly under half of what she is.

Peridot lifts herself from the ground. The excursion that follows is uneventful, if not exhausting. She has a superhuman amount of energy, true, being a gem who specializes in electricity and plasma, but after some indiscernable time that she spends flying, her arm begins to ache. Peridot touches down to the ground and takes off with her other arm. It is refreshing at first, but soon enough, that one starts to ache too. Peridot grinds her teeth and grits through it.

She hovers above an expanse of water, one with pillar-like fountains sprouting from multiple places of origin over its surface. Peridot swallows heavily and searches for dry land, sighing in relief when she locates a strip of it at the front of the room, lining the silvery walls.

Peridot drops herself, not bothering to attempt grace this time around, and lets her arms go limp so she can rest them. She sits there and allows herself a break, figuring that she deserves it after all she's been through. These Crystal Gems aren't very smart, she thinks, leaving their territory so empty and unguarded like this.

Peridot stands once she's recharged, mind whirring to plot out the next part of her escape. She conjures up calculations and dismisses them when they make no sense. She tries to think things through but even her broad understanding and application skills with science aren't helping her here. She comes up with nothing.

Even so, she senses that she is nearing where she needs to be.

Her gem starts itching.

Agitated by the sudden discomfort, Peridot touches her fingers to it on instinct, but this only worsens the irritation. Heat wells in her temple, soft at first and then so intense that Peridot hisses at it, squeezes her eyes shut and fights the white-hot pain that pierces into her. She sways, disoriented, and leans against the wall for support. The wall regurgitates sparks at her in reply and forces Peridot to sway backwards now, dazedly watching as a glowing strip of the wall froths and undulates, as it - as it parts? Is that what's happening?

Her gem throbbing with demented, distorted pain, Peridot continues to observe the bleary scene unfurl before her. It looks like the metallic wall is molten there, the way gooey lines stretch across the slight opening. An abrupt tinny sound fills the space, floods her head, as more sparks dance about her.

The wall separates more as Peridot's body goes cold and her vision blacks out.

* * *

"You won't be able to do this," Peridot says. Except she is not a peridot at all? Is she? She does not know who she is? Her wrists have been strapped to a table. Pale, fleshy wrists.

"Shh, now," the sphalerite looming over her says. There is a scalpel in one hand, some sort of technological device in the other. Her words are saccharine but her face is dead, eyes hollowed out, two juvenile black holes dotting her face. "I know what I'm doing. Your new design will be beautiful. Subservient. Incapable of defection. Oh, Yellow Diamond will be so pleased with how well I've implemented her ideas..."

"You can't!" Peridot says, still not Peridot. She does not know who she is. She does not know who she is. "You can't just program gems. You  _can't_. It's never been done before; gems are not meant to be made."

"Ah, yes, well, tell that to your little friend down on Earth. She is fighting besides synthetic gems right now. In fact, she is the very reason this must be done! Pearls are not meant to have free well, don't you realize? But she has proven that they have that capability."

"And what did she do?" Pearl 1143 asks pleadingly. "What has Pearl 1157 done that is so awful that you must commit genocide?"

"She fell in love," the sphalerite replies simply. Pearl 1143 feels something pierce into her gem and she screams, writhes against this godless table as the very essence of who she is is exposed and prodded and vivisected. "First with the renegade rose quartz, and then with a planet destined to be destroyed."

"Please," Pearl 1143 sobs, as the sphalerite dissects the soul on her forehead. "Please, just kill me, can you not just kill me?"

"Oh, no, I couldn't do that," the sphalerite says. "I am not here to kill you, Pearl 1143. I am merely here to turn you into something new." She brushes strands of off-white hair from 1143's forehead. "Hush now, won't you? You won't even remember any of this, I promise." She pauses thoughtfully. "You know something, 1143? I'm going to leave you a little gift, deep, deep within your gem. I expect that we'll meet again one day. And I look forward to it."

And then the scene is gone. Peridot whimpers and lays puddled on the ground, the stress and fear balling in her chest and throbbing there.  _I just want to go home,_ she thinks.  _Please, please, just let me go home._

Her gem throbs with ache, but the concrete pain in her is dulled now. A hallucination that had flashed across her senses, the nightmarish feeling that had flooded her when it began, but she maddeningly only remembers bits and pieces of it. Pain. Being scared underneath fluorescent lighting. She is aware of the wall wide open before her but her body is quivering and she cannot move.

She has to, though. This is a dark, twisted place: a thought fortified by the way her body trembles, still reeling from whatever has just been done to her. Peridot thrusts her arm through the partition, drags herself forward, forcing energy through her wiring and willpower through her flesh. The door slides shut behind her. Peridot slumps against it. Her only-half-there vision wanders drunkenly over the room, but she glimpses the ocean out of a window. She is free. She has done it.

She musters strength and stands up and moans at the protest her body gives her, legs wobbly and eyesight tipsy but she's otherwise all right. Oh, and pain pulsates circuits in her head, too. Still. She is all right. She is so close.

She looks about her as her sight refocuses. The room is wood-based, simplistic compared to what she's just explored. And gem-free, fortunately. She notices a hung portrait of Steven and the... _other three,_ and vaguely wonders if it's there to signify the fact that this is their main hub. Not a very advanced main hub, if you ask her. Purely because she can, and maybe a little driven by resentment as well, Peridot charges her arm and fires at the picture, savoring the way energy pirouettes at her fingertips, staggering back slightly at the recoil. The portrait falls in black powder to the ground. Nice.

And then she notices the warp pad in front of her.

This is almost too easy.

Too easy.

The warp pad starts glowing.

Peridot braces herself, pushing herself against the wall because there's no escape route that she'll be able to follow in time, and even so her body feels too sapped of energy to do much of anything. And then, because apparently the universe does not  _absolutely_ detest her, only one figure materializes in the vertical column of light. He is facing her. Peridot watches as astonishment mingles with fear on his face.

"Peridot!" he exclaims.

Peridot starts running. The pounding in her head, the stabs of pain in her chest, residual from her excursion of today, are forgotten now, and adrenaline helps her forget it.

"Peridot, noooo!" Steven calls as he follows, though his legs are so stumpy and pathetic that Peridot easily outruns him. She rips through the front door and doesn't notice the staircase until she's flinging herself off the top platform, limbs flailing in mid-air as gravity grabs a hold of her and jerks her downwards. She alights clumsily onto the powdery sand, stands up, and starts running again.

 _Another warp pad,_ she thinks.  _There has to be another one somewhere around here._ She tries to get her fingers to spin but her concentration is blocked by the adrenaline flowing in laps within her.

She's slowed down considerably, considering the fact that metal feet and plush sand don't go well in synchrony, but she glances behind her and sees that Steven is a safe distance from her. Will she miss him once she is home? She mentally slaps herself the moment the question is asked. Of course she won't. He means nothing to her. Peridot commandeers her fingers into a rectangular shape as she runs and laughs in pleasantly surprised joy when light bursts from inside the outline of the rectangle, databases and logs and news loading in front of her. She desperately hopes that nothing too important has transpired since she's been gone. But then she is unable to pull up anything because so focused is she on the screen in front of her that she fails to notice the rock in her path. Peridot descends.

A warped, rumbling sound in the distance, out past the horizon.

She brings herself to her feet and takes off for a third time, ignoring the way Steven yells behind her, ignoring the crescendo of sound that flows across the surface of the ocean towards her: like thunder except silkier, a reverberation she can feel pulsing in her chest.

She can ignore nothing when water bursts from the ocean like a volcanic eruption, skyrocketing up in a horrifically massive pillar. Smaller explosions of water ripple out from the mother geyser, and Peridot falls backwards onto the sand in both astonishment and an unseen force that had body-slammed her when the ocean had ruptured and its innards were vomited upwards.

Steven's yelling finally comes into focus. "Pearl! Garnet! Amethyst! Help!"

She is no longer afraid of how he nears her. A shadow befalls her, the sun's light blocked.

Steven is close to her now. "Peridot!" he yells. "Come here! I can protect you!"

The water begins to cascade down. A fine mist surround her in pretense. Peridot's gaze darts in every direction and there is nowhere she'll be able to go fast enough to escape this.

Steven dive-bombs for her and self-preservation instinct makes Peridot thrust herself out of the way when she sees his gem glowing through his shirt and equates it to the glowing gems of the Crystal Gems, how they had glowed when they summoned their weapons and attacked her.

Water hits her like an encasement of concrete; the pain is immediate and it deluges her, overworking her synthetic sensory organs; it's like getting pulverized by boulders on the half of her that is organic and then malfunction turned into a feeling in her wired parts. Her body writhes and her robotic limbs bleed electricity that is smothered by water. She knows nothing but a rich darkness and the force of the liquid pinning her to the sand. Reality seems to sway.

She feels her body want to retreat back into its ethereal form, but she can't,  _she can't do that,_ Peridot begs it not to; she fights it with all her remaining vitality, her body livid and straining with excrucation and the effort it takes to keep herself corporeal. Her gem pulses as it continues to call her back, getting all the more ferocious and forceful but she is so close oh she is so close to escaping she can't be defeated now; Peridot doesn't care that her body can't take much more damage and her essence screams at her gem to leave her alone.

The stifling force of the liquid begins to slacken, and Peridot floats from the sand and into a planet of water. She gives up and lets herself drift helplessly within it, pain still tearing through her, clawing away at her flesh with soreness and making her limbs sting so badly they feel like they're dissolving.

She feels the ground on her back again, the water caressing her, replaced by air as it careens down her body. Every sliver of her prosthetics that aren't completely sealed spit sparks, namely her joints. Peridot glows with pain and a vicious ache. She turns onto her side and groans, coughing up mouthfuls of water.

She then attempts to force herself to stand, escape still on the forefront of her mind. She doesn't even attempt to decipher what has just happened. She is so close. She is so close. But she topples like a house of cards, her prosthetics piercing her with a mechanical screech in protest. More water gurgles up from her throat and dribbles from her lips and Peridot shivers harder as she feels her body expel the foreign substance from inside of her.  _Ew._

"Peridot! Oh, oh no, oh no, are you okay?"

Peridot moans into the sand.

"U-Uh, here, um, okay, how do I help you?"

Steven's voice. The thoughts flow before she or her mind can stop them.  _Steven isn't like the rest of this hopeless planet. Steven will help me._

Peridot pries open her eyes and hisses at how bright it is. Sun shines down on them, and beside them, the ocean is calm.

"Can you stand up?"

Peridot looks at him. Tendrils of electricity spiderweb across her body.

"Oh," Steven says, "I'm guessing that means no. Your hair looks funny, by the way."

Peridot touches five digits to her hair, and finds that it's wet and plastered thickly to her head, some of it still attempting to defy gravity and swooping up awkwardly. "Wonderful," she grumbles, and it hurts to use her voice. "Thank you."

"No prob, Bob." Steven extends a hand. "C'mon, I'll help you up."

Peridot narrows her eyes distrustfully.

Steven waggles his fingers. "Please, Peridot. Just trust me."

"How are you still dry?" Peridot asks instead.

A pink bubble reverse-dissolves around Steven in answering. Peridot pokes at it and finds that it's deceivingly sturdy.

"It's indestructible," Steven says. "Um. Kind of. I tried to get you inside, too, but you got out of the way before I could."

Peridot recalls his glowing gem.  _He was just trying to save me,_ she realizes. Despite their interactions of the past however-long, Peridot finds that she is surprised. Something wells in her chest and she dismisses it immediately if not sooner.

"Of course I got out of the way," she says. "In my experience, all of the crummy gems on this crummy planet have only tried to attack me."

"I wouldn't try to attack you," Steven replies. "Not unless you try to hurt me or Amethyst or Garnet or Pearl."

"But I already have."

"I like to think of this as a new chapter in our lives."

Peridot blinks up at him. Hesitantly, bracing herself for something awful, her fingertips brush across his palm and grab onto his hand. Steven positively  _beams._

He rears back, trying to pull her up, and Peridot puts her best effort into pulling herself up as well, but between the pains in her body and the fact that Steven is half her size, they don't get very far.

Peridot waits for Steven to give up and leave her there, strewn out on the soaked sand with her prosthetics twitching and flashes of electricity twining around them every now and then, still irritated, and her organic body aching with so much pain and exhaustion it feels like it's just a mass of useless atoms rather than the thing she can control effortlessly under normal circumstances.

"Stay here," Steven says. "I'll be right back, okay? I promise."

He promises. "Just leave me here," Peridot growls, her voice scratchy. "I don't need your help."

"I promise," Steven says, and takes off for the house on the beach.

Peridot watches him leave, little clouds of sand being kicked up by his feet. She doesn't know what to do.

She doesn't know what to do.

Peridot hooks her fingers into the sand and pushes, ignoring the way her chest swells with agony and her limbs sting. She can sit up but the amount of pain and effort it takes is ridiculous. She raises an arm and attempts to pull up her databases for a second time. This does not work. One of her fingers detonates. Bits of metal and worms of wire sprinkle onto the sand, leathery skin that splits into pieces and blackens and curls with the heat. The pain is excruciating but only lasts a second, before her faux nerve synapses cease to exist.

"Great," Peridot says, voice edging hysteria. Her eye twitches. She tries to do that thing she had done earlier, back in the gem imprisonment room, where she had seemingly made her digits materialize out of thin air, but her willpower isn't wanting to work with her here. She'll just have to make do with nine.

_Blast this cruddy planet_ _._

Steven returns, a box in one hand and some sort of fabric in the other.

"Here," Steven says, tossing the large rectangle of fabric to her. "That's a towel. You can dry yourself off with it."

Peridot takes a moment to decide if she actually wants to listen to him, and then runs the fabric down one of her arms, thrilled when the droplets smattering it disappear. She systematically rubs the towel over all her surface area, squeezing out her hair with it and fluffing it up the best she can (she'll just have to reorganize it later). Her body still stings, still aches, but at least she's dry. She holds the towel out to Steven, who takes it from her and tosses it aside.

Next, Steven opens up the cubic box and removes some slim, papery, pale object from it. He peels off the paper, and before Peridot can process what he's doing, he reaches forward and presses his gross steven fingers to her face. Peridot hisses and shoves him away, shuddering in revulsion at the proximity of his human presence.

Steven just laughs and stands up, wiping the sand off his arms and legs. "There," he says, smiling as he looks at her. "All better."

Some sparks fly from Peridot's left elbow joint. Wisps of smoke dance upwards from it.

She touches whatever Steven has just stuck to her cheek. "What is this?" she inquires forcefully. "Will it hurt me? Is it - is it a weapon?"

"It's just a Band-Aid, silly," Steven replies. "You're in luck, too. I gave you the last of the Crying Breakfast Friends edition that I had."

Peridot narrows her eyes. "And what is this...Band-Aid...supposed to do?"

"It heals you up, and keeps dirt and stuff from getting into flesh wounds. I think you must have nicked yourself with a rock or something. You weren't bleeding or anything like that, I don't think gems can bleed, but..."

The urge to peel the thing off her face subsides. "It's like an archaic form of reparation gel, then. One that takes far longer to become effective, so I have to keep it stuck on me for a while?"

"Uh," Steven says, "yeah. Like that."

Peridot nods, accepting this.

Off into the distance, the beach house glows. Peridot watches as panic crests in Steven's eyes, causing panic to crest in her, too. "What is it?" she demands.

Steven shakes his head. "It's nothing it's good everything will be fine -"

Peridot lunges forward and curls her fingers into the upper hem of Steven's shirt. "I  _command_ you to tell me, you subordinate clod of filth!"

"The Gems are back," Steven says.

Peridot lets go of him, eyes widening. "No," she says. "N-No, I'm going to get out of here." A laugh bubbles up from her, something desperate and bad. "As if  _they_ could take me down! I'm so close, Steven, so close now to getting  _out_ of this lousy place!" Pinpricks of cold creep up one arm as she positions it into a laser cannon, and Peridot notes that she has ten fingers again. She is getting stronger with this sort of thing now. Evolving.

(She ignores the majority of her that is purely screeching into the abyss with fear).

"N-No, hey, don't do that!" Steven says. "Don't fight with them, Peridot, please!"

"I don't have a  _choice!_ " Peridot shrieks at him, flailing her arms for emphasis, her voice high-pitched gravel. "They - They've taken  _everything_ from me! They've destroyed all of my things, and now they've damaged my reputation, and  _now_  they're trying to keep me from going home! Do you even realize how abominal they are, Steven? How disgusting this planet and everything on it is?  _I'm_ certainly not going to stand for it anymore."  _Do you know what it feels like to be stranded so far away from home that you feel like you're losing yourself?_

Steven's eyes widen. "You're just like Lapis," he murmurs.

The corners of her eyes are wet.  _"What?_ What does Lapis Laz -"

"Nothing," Steven says quickly. "I-I, uh, think about it, Peridot. You can't fight them! There's three of them and only one of you, for one thing. And look at how weak you are right now and stuff! You won't stand a chance."

The energy cultivating at Peridot's fingertips dies. He is right.  _He is right._  "I'm dead, aren't I?" she says expressionlessly. "They're going to kill me." Steven looks at her like he is sorry.

"Steven!" someone calls from the house.

"Oh, no," Steven whispers. "What to do, what to do..." His eyes roam and fasten onto the towel.

"You couldn't possibly expect me to fit under there," Peridot says, trying to read him.

"That's not what I had in mind."

* * *

"Oh,  _there_ you are!" Pearl says, chest sagging in relief. "Where were you? We were all so worried when you didn't return to us!"

Steven takes Pearl's hand and tugs her down so he can press his index finger to her lips. "Shh," he says, urgently. "There's no time."

"What's going on, Steen?" Amethyst asks, as Pearl grimaces and gently pushes Steven's hand away from her face.

"Steen?" Pearl asks, glancing at her.

"Yeah, it's - nevermind."

Pearl shakes her head and refocuses her gaze on Steven. "What is it? And for stars' sake, Steven, why on earth are you all wet?"

Steven runs out the front door, gesturing for Pearl and the others to follow him. "Look," he says, gesturing to the soaked beach. "Look at what's been done."

"Oh, my," Pearl says. "Did it rain hard while we were gone?"

Amethyst points to the mass of seaweed, rocks, and wildlife that's been washed up onto the shore. "That ain't rain, Pearl."

"It was crazy!" Steven says. "Me and Lion were taking a walk on the beach -"

"Wait, hold on a minute," Pearl says, and Steven is electrocuted by the realization of his error. Pearl's gaze turns intense. Deadly intense. "I thought you came back here to grab something for the mission, and for that purpose only."

"U-Uh," Steven says, "I-I, um, I got distracted." He swallows thickly, and before Pearl can reprimand him, he hurriedly continues with, "But just wait, okay? This is important! So we were walking, and then the ocean - it explodes. This huge geyser shot out of it, and then a bunch of baby geysers from around it, and then a wall of water came down and got everything all wet."

Pearl seems to forget about scolding him. "Oh," she says, stroking her chin. "That actually is quite odd, I'll admit."

"Yeah," Amethyst says, staring out at the water damage that's been done to the beach. "We should probably go check that out."

"Agreed," Pearl says. "Steven, why don't you go get yourself dried off while me and Amethyst and Garnet go investigate?"

"I-I, uh, I can't." He hates lying. He really really hates lying. Sweat beads along his eyebrows. "All of the towels are in Amethyst's room." Really really really really hates lying.

Pearl glares at Amethyst out of the corner of her eye. "And what, exactly, are they doing in there?"

"Woah, hey, what?" Amethyst says, genuinely confused, and Steven's chest burns as he bites his lip almost hard enough to draw blood. "I have no idea how they got in there, I swear! I don't even remember doing anything with towels! Ever!"

"Yes, I'm sure you don't," Pearl says, and Amethyst groans as she pulls down the collar of her shirt, her gem glowing.

"Whatever. I dunno how they got in there, Steven, but go ahead and go grab 'em."

Steven runs for the open temple door before the truth bursts from him. And he runs from Pearl's telltale "You're just going to let him go in there by  _himself?_ "

* * *

Peridot looks up and sees the boy's head poking through the pool on the ceiling.

"Hey!" he calls. "You doing all right?"

"Oh, sure," Peridot says, rolling her eyes and then snapping them into a leering position. "I'm fine, if by all right you mean _trapped in a gross pink bubble._ "

"Uh, yeah, sorry about that," Steven says, grimacing, and then he stands and dips the tip of his foot into the room. "There was no other way for me to get you back in here, y'know? Now, hang tight. Let's just hope I do this right..."

He jumps. Peridot's eyes widen. They widen further when he lands on top of her.

The bubble keeping her afloat pops and she plummets with an alarmed shriek, Steven with a yell. The two of them hit the ground with an unpleasant  _thump._

Peridot pushes Steven off of her like he's a toxic thing. She recognizes where she is and instinctively looks up longingly at the hole in the ceiling.

"Oh, no you don't," Steven says, diving for her and clasping onto her leg, presumably to keep her grounded.

"I know, I know," Peridot grinds out, disgustedly swatting him away. "There's no hope for me. I get it." Hope is a fickle thing. Her hope in this particular situation is limited. Knowledge, however, is not. And she has knowledge. The knowledge that she'll be able to find some other way out, just not right now. An attempt to escape at this very moment would be impulsive and weakly planned, and weak plans lead to terrible outcomes. All she needs is time to think.

It is because of this that Peridot actually allows Steven to lead her back into the red-glow hallway, and the resistance that she does offer is involuntary, caused by the way using the energy needed merely just to stand up makes her want to die with the way her head pounds and her body creaks.

"This is how you got out, isn't it?" Steven says, looking at the infusion cord and its visibility.

"Yes," Peridot replies. "You were stupid enough to trip over it, lending myself to my escape."

"Well, I guess that's in the past now," he says, and wraps his fingers around it. He gives it a simple tug and the cord becomes undone from the port.

Peridot is amazed. "How - how did you -"

"Only me and Pearl can mess with it," Steven says, "because she and my mom were the ones who made it back during the Gem War. I mean...I kind of discovered that by accident, so don't tell Pearl. I don't think she knows I can do stuff with it."

 _Which gem war?_ Peridot wants to ask, but the answer is rather obvious, when she thinks about it. "And you have your mother's gem," she clarifies, "so you have access to everything she had access to."

"Yep. Now, in you go."

For one burning moment, Peridot is tempted to eliminate him and run away, follow the route she had before and try to get out this cursed place again. But Peridot is smarter than that. She walks back into the prison cell.

* * *

A day later, Peridot formulates a screen in between her fingers. Desolation snatches her within its jaws and crushes her.

_Connection to the Gem Homeworld has been lost._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> also i'd like to apologize that this chapter took me a long time and im posting it at 1 am but it was like 9000 words long and also tfw school
> 
> ALSO if chapters take extra long in the future.......it's bc i'm also gonna start working on a pearlidot fantasy au and an ap biology au simultaneously w/ this one at some point


	4. Something in the Horizon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thursday night's episode tho. i just.........i just scream tbh. pearlidot has a genuine chance of developing a canonical foundation now, if they manage to grow together and form a healthy relationship and peridot learns to apologize and see the error in her ways (as foreshadowed in the last scene there) and hhhhhhh. it makes my shipper heart happy.
> 
> anyways, here's chapter four!! it's the only chapter that's not going to take place in the pov of steven, pearl, or peridot, so if the style of this chapter isn't your thing, this is the only chapter that's going to be like this

Yellow Diamond reclines backwards in chair, tapping her fingernails on the touch-based control board before her. "Brown?" she says.

Brown Diamond rises from the plastic chair that's tucked into the shadows of the corner of the room, face stoic, body statue-esque. "Yes, Lady?"

"Bring in Peridot 07 for me, please."

Yellow Diamond watches Brown Diamond nod at the request and disappear out the door, absorbing the most prominent parts of the room and replacing them with her broad shoulders as she crosses it. The room is lavish, embellished in a color pallet of green and yellow; the walls are shelves of gilded technological devices put up for display (historical trinkets of past advancements or her own personal failed technological projects), and in the corner is the blue chair Brown Diamond adores for whatever reason. At the front is Yellow Diamond's metal recliner, hovering a good few feet off the ground, and in front of that, a sprawling flat touchpad that floats in front of an industrial-sized holographic screen. For all intents and purposes, this is her office.

Yellow Diamond proceeds to read through some documents she's just pulled up: news and reports and problems of the day and the like. Everything is neat and orderly. Today doesmark two months since she's sent Peridot 06 to Earth to check up on her experiments; or, in other words, today is the day she's scheduled to actually go through 06's reports. She trusts 06 enough so she's comfortable not keeping up with her to make sure she's doing what she's supposed to be doing. And, since Yellow Diamond's need for the information isn't urgent, not yet, she had figured that she has time until she has to get to the reports when she had initially assigned the mission.

The door bursts open as Brown Diamond returns, a flustered green gem trailing behind her. Brown noiselessly returns to her chair and bores holes into Peridot 07 with her eyes.

Yellow Diamond delights in her peridots: loyal, adoring, subordinate; gorging her ego, a daily reassurance that she is the ruler here, that she is superior and she is cherished. She looks Peridot 07 in the eyes and smiles, just for fun, lapping up the way the peridot's body glows with ecstacy, her body shuddering like it's about to fall apart just from the simple glance. She's near identical to 06, save for a slight alteration in facial structure. The most recent peridots are stronger, more advanced, more capable, but Yellow Diamond's first ten? She almost likes them more, vampiric off of the way she is their whole universe.

"Peridot 07," she purrs, like silk, like a cat to a mouse. The peridot's eyes are stars. "How are you?"

Peridot 07 squirms where she stands, and Yellow Diamond can see into her insides, where anxiety and awe and bliss clash in a maelstrom.

"I-I've been good, ma'am," the peridot says, and Yellow Diamond smiles; indeed she has been. "We've been developing new methods of stabilizing the gem clusters. Peridot 963 has a particularly clever idea."

"I'll hear from her later," Yellow Diamond says. "I called you in here to ask about Peridot 06."

"Oh," Peridot 07 says.

"Have you heard from her?"

"I received several reports from her at first," Peridot 07 replies, "but the logs stopped coming in approximately one month ago."

"What a shame," Yellow Diamond says. "Something must have happened to her." No matter, really; her peridots are created to be disposable. If she's being completely honest with herself, she had never quite expected 06 to return home unscathed. When the Red Eye had failed to return, it became evident that hazardous things still lurked on that planet.

("It's fine," she had told 06. "There are no hazardous things there. Your work will be able to progress uninterrupted.")

Really, she had just wanted Peridot 06 to get as much done as she could. If she returned home safely, wonderful. If not, then, ah well. The information she would cultivate would be valuable either way.

"Yes," Peridot 07 says, soft, but Yellow Diamond sees the malice in her eyes. "What a shame."

"You understand what that means, I'm assuming."

"That I'll replace her."

"But you still do realize why it was 06 who was selected for the Earth mission, not you?"

Peridot 07's face now clouds with shame. "She was better than me," she mutters.

"Louder."

"She was better than me."

"I will allow you to replace her, but if you don't improve, I'll replace  _you_ with 05. Understood?"

Peridot 07 shudders. "Yes, ma'am."

"Good," Yellow Diamond says. "A ship will be ready for you within the next twenty-four hours. In the meantime, may I see Peridot 06's reports?"

"Of course." Peridot 07 inches forward hesitantly, eyes saucers as she gives Yellow Diamond an inquiring stare.

"Yes," Yellow Diamond says, "you may approach me."

Peridot 07 nods and advances towards Yellow Diamond's display of technology; she presses five fingertips to the touchpad, and as light pumps from them, feeding the machine with data, her eyes alight with a green-fire glow. Yellow Diamond watches with satisfaction as new data forms on the holographic monitor before her, everything from typed daily logs to voiced reports.

"Thank you," she says. "You are dismissed. You may contact Orange Diamond if you wish to have a jasper escort for your mission. Report to me directly before you leave. That is all. I wish you luck, 07."

Peridot 07 bows extravegantly and Brown Diamond leads her out of the room.

"She's going to die," Brown says after the door's been closed. "What makes you think 07 won't suffer the same fate as 06?"

"We'll see," Yellow Diamond muses.

Brown Diamond pinches the bridge of her nose. "Look, I know you love your peridots, Lady. But they aren't meant for this sort of thing. They're meant for technology and service."

"They have built-in defense and offense devices," Yellow Diamond argues. "I blueprinted them myself. I would never leave the poor things defenseless."

"Defense mechanisms don't mean a damn thing if they don't know how to use them. Most, if not  _all_ your peridots don't know how to do anything but pull up that screen thing in between their fingers and work some fancy machines."

"I'm not an imbecile, Brown. Imbecilic gems do not take over entire planets. Of course the peridots don't know how to use their weaponries. Have you seen the competition between them? I can't have them running around shattering each other; the peridot sector would descend into chaos. The peridots' weapons are triggered purely by self-preservation instinct. Peridot 06 has most likely discovered this by now."

"Peridot 06 is most likely dead," Brown Diamond says.

"What has happened to Peridot 06 is no longer my concern."

"Fine," Brown Diamond says. "Let's just say, hypothetically, that 06 is still alive and she manages to find a way back home. What will you do then?"

"She can stay, but I won't give her her position back. I'll rather place her at the bottom as repent for getting captured or whatever's happened to her. I don't need a peridot who doesn't know how to carry out missions to my expectations." Yellow Diamond taps something on her touchscreen and opens the folder containing 06's collected data for her latest mission. "If you truly have concerns, go talk to my sphalerites. They know the peridots inside and out."

"I don't have concerns, Lady," Brown Diamond says. "I'm merely ensuring that you're still keeping track of things. You have a naivety about you that almost got you killed a few times during the Domain War."

Yellow Diamond grins; she's fond of Brown, she really is. "You're free to go, Brown Diamond. I won't be needing anything else from you today."

Brown Diamond is irritated but stands and bows. "Thank you, Lady," she says, and exits the room.

Yellow Diamond swivels back to her expanse of screen, gliding her fingertips along the touchpad below it to scroll through the files and open one of them.

" _This is Peridot, updating status. Still stuck on this miserable planet. The fusion experiments are developing properly. A few have even emerged early AAH -_ "

Yellow Diamond blinks at the abrupt end, but figures that there are still reports dated later than this one, so it couldn't have been anything too bad. Other than that, though, she is pleased thus far. The cluster experiments are not perfect yet, she's aware, but they're getting there. With any luck, she'll have stabilized fusions to fight in her army by the time she needs them.

By the time she needs them. A shiver flows down her spine.

Yellow Diamond careens through the rest of 06's fusion reports, taking notes on a seperate monitor that floats beside her for future reference. All of Peridot 06's work on Earth has been neatly organized into two folders:  _Kindergarten Observations_ and then  _Other._ And another file there, too, drifting homelessly next to the two folders:  _helpp._ Hm.

Yellow Diamond finishes going through  _Kindergarten Observations_ and extracts what she needs, then glances at the remaining content. Though anything unrelated to the fusion experiments are by default miscellaneous, as that was the one thing Peridot 06 had been sent on the mission to report on, she has nothing else to do, she supposes. Yellow Diamond opens up  _Other._

" _This is Peridot."_ Yes, I know.  _"Warp repair success. All seventy-nine flask robonoids deployed and accounted for. Preparing to locate and manually reactivate Kindergar -"_ She cuts off there, but Yellow Diamond has gathered enough. So Peridot 06 has managed to repair the warps, then. But Yellow Diamond had sent a zoisite to attempt to warp to Earth just the other day, and they had still been broken. Yellow Diamond discards the thought for now and opens up the next file.

" _Established gem projection link with control room. Plug robonoid has successfully landed on Planet Earth and entered prime Kindergarten control room in Facet Five..."_ Yellow Diamond has heard enough and deletes the file, deeming it useless. The rest of the files are meaningless to her as well, empty observations:

" _Now accounting for all observational objectors...checking for aberrations in perimeter..._

_...There appears to be an infestation of 'stevens' in the Kindergarten..."_

That last one actually does capture Yellow Diamond's attention. Stevens? Have they replaced humans as the dominant species on Earth? Are they dangerous, dangerous enough to have been the ones to destroy her Red Eye? She opens the next file.

Peridot 06's voice begins to lose its apathetic, cold tone in this one.  _"This is Peridot. Update: humans are still dominant species on Earth. 'Steven' appears to be a mere subspecies. The presence of gems on Planet Earth has been accounted for; three thus far. They appear to be calling themselves the 'Crystal Gems.' They have destroyed warp pads, my robonoids, and have contaminated the fusion experiments. I apologize for any halt in my progress."_ Fear reads crystal-clear in her voice, though Yellow Diamond can tell she attempts to conceal it for the sake of professionalism.

Something grips her, not fear but not apathy. The Crystal Gems? Impossible. They were destroyed thousands of years ago. Yellow Diamond checks the date of the file, and ah, yes, she remembers that date. Peridot 07, the one who had been receiving Peridot 06's reports under the order to report them back to Yellow Diamond after two months, had come to her on that date. Peridot 06, at the time, had just returned from Earth, and had been locked in a control room that linked to Facet Five of the Kindergarten, ordered not to emerge or socialize with anyone until her mission was completed.

"Peridot 06 has wishes to bring a ship back to Earth to eliminate of some things," 07 had said on that date. "Some bits of new information have arisen. Do you wish to listen to the file?'

"I trust you, 07," Yellow Diamond had replied. Oh, how the peridot's eyes had gleamed when she'd said this. "If you truly feel as though it is that important, you may contact Orange Diamond. She will gladly lend 06 a spacecraft if the situation is as urgent as you say. I have bigger things to worry about."

Crystal Gems. How interesting. But are they a threat? No.

Yellow Diamond opens the next file.

" _This is Peridot, transmitting on all frequencies from abandoned Crystal System Colony Planet Earth, to Yellow Diamond. My mission has been compromised, my escort and informant are gone, and I am now stranded. Please send help!"_

Ah. This must be after the ship had reached Earth, then. Peridot 06's resolve to rid Earth of Crystal Gems was clearly not very successful.

"You should have opened these files sooner, you know," and Yellow Diamond startles, swiveling herself around. See sees the gem before her and her eyes harden.

"How many times have we spoken about asking permission before entering my office?'

Orange Diamond grins. "Enough times to make me never want to ask permission."

"What do you want?"

"I want to let you know that you should have opened those files sooner."

"So I've derived," Yellow Diamond says. "Why? The information derived by Peridot 06 regarding Earth is not urgent. I figured I don't have to get to it immediately."

"You figure a lot of things, Yellow. It's not a good leading strategy. Do you know what's happened to 06?"

"All that you've reported to me is that you sent a ship with her, a jasper escort, and the lapis lazuli to Earth to attempt to take care of some detriments."

"And then the three of them proceeded to capture the Crystal Gems and Peridot 06 flew the spacecraft back here, only to have the Crystal Gems destroy the ship, Peridot 06 flee in an escape pod back to Earth, and the jasper and lapis lazuli suffer an unknown fate."

"And this is important because? I have no intentions of rescuing the three of them; they're expendable. Even the lazuli. Her era is long gone."

"Seriously?" Orange says. "The Crystal Gems are still alive, they destroy one of our space fleets, halter 06's progress, and you don't think it's important?"

"Let's dissect this together, shall we?" Yellow Diamond replies. "The Crystal Gems are still alive. So what? There's only three of them, and their purpose in existence is to defend Earth, not leave it to fish for new threats. They won't bother us. We can rebuild a space fleet. I've already replaced 06."

"I'm just saying that maybe it's not...Maybe it's not a coincidence, Yellow. The fact that Earth is causing us inconveniences at the same time you sense... _her._ It. Whatever Blue is by now."

Yellow Diamond almost laughs at the idea. "You're not actually suggesting that Red hid the diamonds on Earth, are you?" she asks incredulously, and Orange Diamond chews on her lip.

"It's not entirely impossible."

"Not entirely impossible, no, but entirely unlikely. Red always hated Earth. What reasons would she have to bring the diamonds  _there_?"

"Red was enigmatic, to say the least; always keeping things from the three of us. Who's to say there wasn't something going on on Earth that she never told us about?"

"We're not touching Earth," Yellow Diamond says, "until I have solid evidence of your ludicrous theory. Even once I no longer need that planet to host experiments, I'm not going to waste the firepower."


	5. Wi-Fi

"Tonight," Garnet had said. "I'm almost sure of it." She's been almost sure of it every day for the past week.

Pearl presses herself further into submersion, until the water swallows her entirely. It really is relaxing, she'll give it that. For a human concept.

"Pearl?" she hears Steven call, in the distorted manner sounds are received as when traveling underwater, "Will you come tuck me in?" She breaks the surface of the water and looks through the open door. Steven runs across the doorway, then runs back and pokes his head in through the door in a double-take. "Pearl?" he says again. "What are you doing?"

"I'm bathing," Pearl answers simply.

"Um," Steven says, "you're not usually supposed to get your clothes wet when you take a bath."

Pearl stares owlishly at him. "Well, why would I need to take them off? Our bodies are self-sanitizing. I don't have any need to clean my skin. I am here merely for the therapeutic benefits."

"Hey, leave her alone, Steven," Amethyst says from the living room. "C'mere, I'll tuck you in." Pearl casts her a grateful look. Today has been one of those days glossed over in squirming bundles of nerves and she can't pinpoint why; it's gotten better over the years, but spontaneous spikes of anxiety aren't something Pearl's unaccustomed to. This warm water, though, the smooth acrylic on her back, the smallness and the safety and the enclosement of this room - it makes her feel better.

"Okay," Steven says. "G'night, Pearl."

"Goodnight, Steven."

She watches him leave and leans out of the bathtub, vowing to dry and clean the floor later when droplets of water spatter it. She closes the door, shuts the light off, and retreats into the water that's turned black with the darkness, submerging herself again, wisps of hair brushing her cheeks, the world quieting and reality hazing over. She should really try doing this more often.

One more hour, she decides, and then she'll go stand watch.

* * *

 

Peridot stretches her fingers and retries several things:

A charge beam erupts from her arm into the prison cell bars, but the bars hiss and glow and the beam dissolves as it hits them.

She concentrates very hard and digs within herself for connections, but her holographic screen consistently presents her with the same message.

She pokes her fingers through the grated holes in the bars and adjusts the magnetic field of her arm, but there is no angle possible that she can launch her digits to where the infusion port is without touching the bars. She'd already learned this the hard way. On the floor is the ex-spot of a melted finger that had laid in a small, glassy mound on the floor. It was a disturbing experience, but it was whatever, really; she's fairly comfortable with re-summoning lost body parts by now. The first time, with her foot - that had been an accident, and when she had brought back her fingers, that had been a willpower-driven accident and now...She's perfected it. She's had so much time, after all, sitting and rotting in this cell, that practice with her newly-discovered abilities is one of the few things she can do to entertain herself. She's even learned how to detach the metal halves of her arms and legs and then proceed to re-summon them with ease. As in, if she wanted to, she could hold the elbow of an arm within her fingers and wield the limb like a macabre sword.

She checks the digital clock on her holo-screen, the one that's been synced to Earth's rotation around the sun, and it is precisely 9:02 PM. Steven had told her once that by nightfall, the temple falls into silence: he is asleep, and the Crystal Gems are doing their own things in the respective rooms that are, incidentally, the same rooms that Peridot had passed through during her first escape attempt. To think that she had slunk through their most personal pieces of territory...It makes her grateful that she wasn't caught and decimated at any point during the excursion.

She has nothing to do tonight, and this "sleep" business doesn't sound particularly appealing to her. Peridot pulls up her screen and stares wistfully at the "no signal" notification and something gnaws at her chest.

 _I want to go home,_ she thinks, certainly not for the first time, but something is dying in her and she knows that something is dying in her because she doesn't think the words with the same conviction that she once had. The reassurance that Homeworld is coming to get her is starting to fray within her, haze over like a child's dream, and she  _hates_ it; stars, she hates  _herself_ for it. She feels like she's done something horrifically wrong. She feels traitorous and she feels disgusted with herself.

Maybe her loss of connection is symbolic. Maybe it's all a cruel joke on her.

" _It's not your fault,"_  Steven had said once.

" _You're right,"_  Peridot had replied.  _"It's yours. You're no better than them. Than the Crystal Gems."_  She still blames herself. Well. Mainly because if she had been better, she never would have gotten herself into this situation in the first place.

Peridot does the best she can to defog her thoughts. Focus on the task at hand. Concentrate.  _Concentrate._

She sucks in a breath and alters herself back into technician mode, as that is the only way she'll be able to figure out a way out of here. When connected to Homeworld, she could have easily researched how to disable the cell, now that she's identified it and its details. Not that she can't be clever without the databases; it merely makes things easier.

Far, far easier.

But then, maybe she doesn't need technology at all. She didn't use technology the first time.

Peridot stares at the general vicinity of where the infusion port is, mind churning. She actually leans in too close to the cell's bars and hisses when they burn her and then a thousand tiny light bulbs go off within her, all at once. Because she is reminded of the melted finger on the ground.

She can't believe she hadn't thought of it before.

Peridot detaches her fingers and they fall to the ground with a metallic clatter. She holds her arms out to the cell bars, just barely far away enough for her not to be burned, and she summons her fingers back to her.

They reform on the other side of the bars, the fingers on the floor evaporating in sparkling dust.  _Yes._

Peridot mentally adjusts the magnetic and gravitational fields around her arms so her fingers are propelled a safe distance from the cell bars. She's totally got this. She's going to figure it out. She's already made it this far.

So:

  1. Anyone is able to draw the infusion cord and port into visibility, but
  2. Steven and the pearl are the only two gems able to actually detach the cord from the port.



These are the only two bits of information Peridot has to work with. She isn't used to the lack of detail.

Peridot shifts her fingers far to the left, and then down, carefully manipulating clouds of protons and electrons in the space around them so they are attracted to where they need to be (upon arriving to Earth, she had been disappointed to find that the planet doesn't harbor any magnetic gases of its own but relieved about the fact that the gas shrouding her fingers still does its function of keeping the metal digits afloat, even on a foreign planet where it doesn't exist). She taps the wall with one digit and the infusion port sparks a little as it becomes visible, the cord unfurling across the floor. But she isn't able to mess with the cord when it's like this, how is she meant to...

Steven.

Steven comes down here every single day. There has to be residue from his organic being all over the place. Dead skin cells, the protein from his hair and fingernails...

She's never manipulated something like this before, but she's seen other peridots do it. She has the capability. Peridot draws in a focusing breath and sets to work:

She moves the the clouds of magnetic gas to pull her fingers closer to her, and then she swabs five digits across the space where Steven usually sits, formulating her screen with her other five.

Words appear on the screen:  _Analyzing._

"Yes," Peridot breathes.  _"Yes!"_

_Compounds found:_

  * _-keratin_
  * _-birefingent filamentous scleroprotein keratin (stratum corneum)_
  * _-SiO2_
  * _-CaCO3_
  * _-various hydrocarbons (_ _more detail here )_



...And the list goes on, but Peridot only needs those top two. His hair and his...stratum corneum, which, according to a couple taps of further research, is the outermost layer of epidermal skin. Where dead skin cells are found and shed. It's actually rather interesting, if not gross, enough so that Peridot forgets the task at hand and spends a few minutes curiously scrolling through databases regarding the chemical makeup of human beings.

And she stills. Because she has opened a database. She is using a database.

Hope beginning to boil in her gut, Peridot opens a new tab and tries to pull up her communications with Homeworld.

_Connection to the Gem Homeworld has been lost._

Peridot growls in frustration and closes the tab. The other one she has open, the one regarding humans' chemicals, is functioning flawlessly. The hope reaches its boiling point, evaporates, and recondenses as ire. She doesn't understand anything and it's making her exceptionally unhappy.

Could it be that...Even for such an archaic planet, could it be that Earth has its own database that Peridot's unintentionally linked herself to?

She...doesn't see why  _not._

It's not entirely useless, she supposes. Even if anything regarding Homeworld has been disrupted within her body's machinery, at least she has something to consult if she doesn't understand an earthly thing.

Peridot refocuses on her task. She selects the dead skin cell information, adjusts a few sliders, and her non-screen set of fingers glows as it self-sanitizes itself of everything except the cells. She rubs her fingers on the ground again and does this several times. Several, several times. Enough times to ensure that the pads of her fingers are caked with Steven's stratum corneum.

Peridot glances nervously back to the infusion port, and she doesn't even know if this will work. There is also the problem that skin cells are very, very small. If she had a duplicator wand equipped, she would be far more confident in her plan; she could duplicate the cells enough to have a blanket of Steven's skin to unplug the cord through. Easy.

But she does not have a duplicator wand equipped. She has reached a dead end.

Peridot closes her eyes and concentrates hard enough to block out everything except the matrices of her thoughts. There  _has_ to be a way.

 _Well, what about the pearl?_ Gems don't have epidermal layers or anything of the sort; their bodies are made of light and one multi-functional compound that isn't found on Earth. There is no need for biochemistry when their bodies are mere illusions projected by their gems. So how does the port recognize the pearl's touch? If she can figure that out, and - and combine it with the DNA that currently resides on her fingers perhaps, she doesn't know, this might actually work.

 _Think, 06. That's what you're made for, right? Thinking?_ She sifts through cultivated information, evaluating each source, putting useless bits in one mental pile and the useful in another. Narrowing it down. Rinse and repeat.

Even so, she has nothing except for one thing. Steven had told her once about the innards of the temple, and about how, as stated earlier, each of the Crystal Gems have their own respective rooms that are only activated by their respective gems. None of them have a peridot nestled on their forehead, and yet Peridot had been able to open one of the doors. The pearl's door, to be precise. How, she has absolutely no idea, and quite honestly she doesn't like to think back to that nightmarish experience, but if she can open a pearl's door, she doesn't see why she wouldn't be able to operate a pearl-made infusion port.

But, no, even that's a cloudy thought. She'd already tried to unplug it with her own flesh back on that day, and to no avail.

Peridot scowls childishly at the infusion cord as if doing so will make it detach, and then something happens. A tendril of red fog from the front of the vestibule emerges towards her, prodding at the ground and then pressing itself flush against it. The serpentine slinks along the stone floor, and Peridot shuffles back slightly, apprehensive. It stops underneath the infusion port and climbs the wall; it coils around the multi-hued bulb and stills like that, pulsating slightly.

 _It's trying to tell me something,_ Peridot realizes, but the thought is intrusive; she doesn't know where it came from. She spends so much focus on attempting to analyze the fog that she startles when more threads of red mist become evident in her peripheral vision, dozens of them, and the tendril wrapped around the infusion port is glowing as its counterparts snake their ways up the wall and arrange themselves into words:

_Try to unplug it now. With the fingers that have his DNA on them._

Peridot's first instinct is to follow the order given to her and her fingers twitch towards the words, and then she reconsiders. This is weird. Way weirder than what she's comfortable with, and she's accepted  _several_ foreign things into her comfort zone since coming to Earth. But she's running out of options. She no longer has the time to not grasp at straws. Peridot inhales deeply and presses her DNA-caked fingers to the port.

The infusion port sears to the touch and Peridot hisses and detaches her fingers on instinct, and the red smoke throbs and augments, consuming the digits like a starved mutant organism. It then begins to dissolve, and by the time all the fog has cleared, the cord lays severed on the floor, the prison cell bars evaporating. Peridot isn't as excited as she would have been a few minutes ago. She's scared to move at all.

The hallway is silent and lifeless. Peridot reels one set of fingers back to her arm and re-summons the other, causing the five that are melded to the infusion port to dematerialize. She pokes her head out of the cell and stares at the front of the hall.

This is most likely her last chance. She is frightened of several things: of the red lighting of the hallway, of passing through the Gems' rooms because the likelihood that she'll encounter at least one of them is high, of opening the pearl's door again. But this is most likely her last chance.

* * *

 

Pearl sits at the end of Steven's bed, staring intently at the rise and fall of his chest. It is what she's been doing every night for the past week; they've known, thanks to Garnet, that Peridot is going to escape, but  _when_ she's going to escape was unclear. And, because she is responsible and selfless and such a valuable asset to the team, Pearl had graciously taken it upon herself to watch for Peridot every night when the sun goes down and everyone retires for the night, which generally leaves the beach house unguarded and open to escape attempts.

There is a wash of light from downstairs, and Pearl's hand goes to her gem on instinct before she recognizes the distinct light of the temple door opening; not anything remotely related to Peridot. Amethyst emerging for a midnight snack, most likely.

Pearl stands up, threading her fingers through Steven's hair one last time, and begins to walk down the staircase. "Amethyst, have you heard anything suspicious regarding -"

That is not Amethyst.

The gem huddled against the temple door snaps her eyes open, and they're widened, pupils shrunken in fear when they fasten on Pearl. Her fingers ( _fingers,_ Pearl takes note; she must be able to re-summon them after all and that is most definitely a problem) are pressed to her gem, as if in pain. "No," she says, voice contorted, and Pearl examines her quivering skin, the fear and surrender glittering alongside the moonlight in Peridot's eyes. Something is wrong with her.

That's none of Pearl's concern, however. She is the enemy and Pearl has a task. And thus she pulls her spear from her gem, more to assert dominance than anything else; she won't attack, not yet, seeing as Peridot isn't weaponizing herself and doesn't seem in any condition for combat.

And then there is also the bigger, more pressing issue that Peridot has just emerged from the temple. By herself. With her peridot gemstone.

"You should know," Pearl begins, and she's practiced this line many times by now and so she's pleased with how powerful and condescending her voice ends up sounding, "before you attempt another escape, that Steven is an awful, awful liar."

Peridot tries to stand, and Pearl grips her spear tighter in preparation, and Peridot hisses, her eyes scrunching in pain, stumbling for balance as she brings herself up. Pearl hardly feels threatened, but her grip remains.

"What are you talking about?" Peridot asks scratchily, her eyes hardened and cold.

"We all know this isn't the first time you've escaped, Peridot."

Her eyes widen. "You  _do?_ But - but Steven -"

"Whatever effort Steven made to hide you was ruined when he brought you back into the Burning Room without any means of getting himself back out." He had defended her when the Crystal Gems had figured out what had happened and Garnet went to retrieve him, weaving some excuse for her and "it's okay please don't hurt her everything's okay now" but Pearl's not about to let Peridot have the satisfaction of knowing that Steven had vouched for her.

She doesn't like the fact that Peridot is influencing him to lie at all.

"You just don't  _get_ it, do you? " Peridot says, stepping forward and poking one finger into Pearl's chest, and Pearl grimaces and is repulsed and apprehensive at the contact. "As I said before, this garbage planet has an expiration date, and if you want to stick around for that, then that's not my problem. I, however," and now her fingers drift into a position, and Pearl watches them carefully, " _am not._ "

She fires a ball of electric green charge at her, but Pearl sees it coming and effortlessly flows out of the way, slinking behind Peridot so she can spin and stab the small of the other gem's back with her foot. Peridot makes this inexplicable sound of surprise, the energy swelling at her fingertips glitching as she turns around, but Pearl's already a step ahead of her, launching herself in the air over her; she lands like an alighting swan, dodges an electricity-charged arm that strikes for her. Pearl is not fighting but evading, goal met when Peridot starts swaying dizzily towards her rather than lunging with calculated blows. Pearl takes the opportunity to twirl in place to gain momentum and then swing her leg into Peridot's side; the blow knocks the wind out of Peridot and she falls, able to catch herself on her fingers as she tumbles backwards. She lays like that, on her back, propped up by her arms, legs outspread. Vulnerable. Pearl looms over her.

"You can't win, Peridot," she says. Silver light leaking in through the windows highlights Peridot's defeated figure, reflecting fear in her eyes like the iridescence of a cat's irises in darkness. Pearl twirls her spear within a hand and Peridot weakly and awkwardly crab-walks backward until the back of her head is pressed against the temple's door, and a moment or two later she finds herself with Pearl's blade pressed to her throat. "If you know what's good for you, you'll allow me to walk you peacefully back into your cell. If you don't know what's good for you, then I suppose we could do this the hard way, too."

"As if I'd let myself be ordered around by the likes of you," Peridot replies, saying the last word like a spritz of acid. But her hostile expression betrays shallow terror when Pearl presses the blade further against her jugular, hard enough to draw blood if they were human.

"You're weak, Peridot," Pearl says, no compassion in her as she stares down at the helpless gem beneath her. She is the enemy. It is no matter that she's vulnerable, and scared, and in the same position that Pearl had been in so many years ago; she is harmless like this, nothing more than a frightened, presumably younger gem on a planet she's unfamiliar with, and it's not her fault, really, that she was raised to have Homeworld's ways infused into her, and -  _no, no, stop it, Pearl. Enemy. No compassion._

To Peridot's credit, she does manage a smug glitter in her eyes and a twisted, delinquent smile. "Oh,  _I'm_ the weak one?" she says. "And what do you know about strength? You're just a pearl. The rest of you are  _dead_ anyways."

 _Just a pearl. Just a pearl._ The part of her arguing to be compassionate and understanding vaporizes. Pearl grits her teeth and clutches her spear tighter, with a sudden and extremely brief urge to grind Peridot's gem into a dusty pulp. She takes a sharp breath to attempt to calm herself - Peridot may be bratty and irritating and Pearl's enemy, but she doesn't deserve death, at the very least - and her hands tremble, heat scalding her cheeks.  _Just a pearl._

_(As for the bit about the rest being dead? Something, a deadweight suspicion that's festered in the corner of her mind over the years, a cold, empty feeling of foreboding, breaks open from its kennel of denial and towers over her other thoughts. Pearl wrangles it into a bottle. Thinking about it now will destroy her.)_

"I am not," she says, the thunderstorm in her voice a maelstrom now, " _just_ a pearl. I am everything that you are not. I am loyal and compassionate and strong and if you think your side is going to win, if you think that I'm going to allow this planet to be harmed in any way, then you are grossly underestimating me." She advances, readjusts the grip around her spear, puts one foot on Peridot's chest. "If I'm just a pearl," she says, words and memories sailing in a mantra in her mind, memories of Garnet admitting her admiration, memories of Steven's arms around her and  _"Well, I think you're pretty great,"_ memories of the hundreds of times Amethyst has crushed her with her hugs and her support, "then you're nothing more than a measly grain of mineral."

"Loyalty," Peridot mutters, followed by a sick, humorless laugh. "What do  _you_ know about loyalty?"

"More than you," Pearl is sure.

"You think you -" but Peridot can't keep a straight face and she laughs genuinely this time, resting her head against the temple door. "You think  _you_ have more loyalty than I do? A rebellious, defective pearl compared to a peridot who's spent thousands of years being nothing but wholesomely dedicated to her leader?  _Please._ "

"I never said," Pearl says, "that my loyalty was towards my Homeworld domain. My loyalty lies within Rose Quartz. It is a dedication founded on emotion, compassion, love, and something worth fighting for. And what is your loyalty based upon?"

Peridot's amused expression falters. "What?"

"If you claim that your sense of loyalty is as true and as unadulterated as mine, then tell me its foundation," Pearl says, and her spear evaporates as she crosses her arms. Peridot's immediate instinct is to sit up now that the weapon is gone, but Pearl applies more weight to the leg stepping on her breast, preventing her from doing so.

"Well," Peridot says, "it's not founded from a place of corruption and betrayal to my home planet, for one thing."

"You say that, and yet fail to recognize the corruption of your precious home planet. It took me a while, too."

"Stop it."

"Surely, since your being here, you've started to realize it? Since becoming friends with our Steven?" She's trying a new approach: changing her attitude, rationalizing things more. The current goal is to keep Peridot detained long enough to find out if Steven's Rose magic - his innate ability to befriend anything and launch them into a story of positive character development - will work with her. It's a long shot, she knows, but Steven deserves the chance to prove himself. She's doing this for him. And if she can help in any way, provoking thoughts in Peridot's mind to get her thinking, then she'll do that.

It isn't working very well. Peridot doesn't seem to be realizing anything quite yet.

"I said," Peridot says through gritted shark-like teeth, her voice a low, enflamed growl, " _stop it."_

Pearl sighs. Peridot is no better than she had been when they had first caught her. Poor Steven, too, he had been trying so hard...

"It's up to you," Pearl says, "how open-minded you choose to be. Either way, you aren't leaving here. Ever."

"You're wrong," Peridot says. "Homeworld is going to come for me, and they're going to  _crush_ you clods..." Peridot laments on, and Pearl tunes her out. These speeches of bursting temper aren't an uncommon thing with Peridot, it would seem, and Pearl is not intimidated in the slightest.

Steven is heard from upstairs, and both Pearl and Peridot freeze and look up. He's still asleep, murmuring something about Cookie Cat, but. Pearl doesn't want him to wake.

"Come with me," she says, opening the door to her room.

"As if I'd listen to you," Peridot says, but she makes a high-pitched, undignified sound of fear when Pearl withdraws another spear and holds it to Peridot's gem.

"Again I'll say it," Pearl says. "There's an easy way and a hard way to do this."

Peridot's pupils thin like a cat's, eyes condensing into a viper-like glare. "Fine," she says. "I'll go." Death threats are always so effective.

Pearl removes her foot, watching Peridot closely as she rises to ensure she doesn't try anything. She grabs the flesh part of Peridot's arm and tugs her into her room with her, and as the door seals shut behind them, Pearl whirls around to face her. The monster of her own thoughts is scraping her with its claws from the inside and she cannot wrestle it down anymore:

"Tell me what happened to the pearls."

"Hey, I'm just a measly grain of mineral, right?" Peridot says, snark evident but she's watching Pearl's spear carefully. "What do I know?"

"Take me seriously, or you'll regret it."

Peridot closes her eyes as if deep in thought, tapping her foot on the floor. "Alright, fine," she says, opening one eye. "You really want to know?"

Suspicious of the sudden change in attitude, but too desperate to care, Pearl says, "Yes."

"You were weak. Defective. Too defective to even carry out the single thing you were made for." Her smirk stretches across her face and it churns Pearl's stomach. "And you know what? The pearls' genocide is your fault."

Pearl's body goes limp and her insides crystallize into glaciers. "Wh...What?"

Something sick and sadistic glowers cynically behind Peridot's visors. "That's right. Since the little stunt you pulled, Homeworld amassed the pearls and they -"

A figure erupts from the water, and Peridot squeaks, flinging herself back at the wall, and no, no, not now, Peridot was finally talking -

But it's too late, and Garnet takes Peridot into her fists and she crushes her. It seems to be a recurring theme.

"I sensed danger," she says. "I came to help."

"Garnet," Pearl whispers, staring wide-eyed at the green cloud. "She was finally about to talk, and you..."

Garnet shrugs, a bubble formulating around the gem in her hands. "Whoops."


End file.
